STUDIES 



ibie 'Jlrutbs 



JOHN C. KEENER 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Cliap.„y..\)copyriglit SoS3. 



SlieltL. 



,--K4- 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



STUDIES 



OF 



SSible ZCrutbe. 



B7 



n 



J. C. KEENER, D.D., LL.D., 

One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Churchy South. 



Nashville, Tekn,: 

Publishing House of the m. e. Church, south, 

Baebee & Smith, Agents. 

1899. 



8U548 



Library of Concfresa 

Iwo Copies Recewco 

my 26 1900 

SECOND COPY 

Oe(ivered to 

ORDER DIVISION 
DEC 15 1900 



^ 



•h 



5"^^ 

f ^ 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S99, 
By the Book Agents of the M. E. Church, Soxtth, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



DEDICATION. 

TO THE 

Superannuated ministers of Southern metbodism: 

WE HAVE WORKED TOGETHER 

IN THE lord's vineyard, HAVE REJOICED TOGETHER, 

AND GROWN OLD TOGETHER. 

Tour Brother in Christy 

The Author. 



(ui) 



Preface. 

The wisest of men has said : " My son, be 
admonished : of making many books there is 
no end ; and much study is a weariness of the 
flesh." 

With these admonitions, one should be able 
to give a reason for swelling the vast store of 
books already made. But for this book I am 
not wholly responsible ; for had it not been for 
the encouragement and help of the editor of 
The Methodist Review^ Dr. Tigert, I do not 
think its pages would have seen the light. 

It has been my purpose to present in these 
"Studies" only that which is original, and to 
exclude error, not by controversy, but by con- 
structing truth. 

(V) 



Contents. 

Page 

Introduction ix 

I. The Creative Glory in its Two Distinct 

Realms — the Natural, the Moral i 

The Two Realm s 2 

The Will 4 

The Realm of >« ature 6 

The Moral Real m 13 

The Arch of Me rcy 15 

Why Free? 19 

The Flexibility of Moral Law 19 

The History of Freedom 22 

The Lord of Gi*>ry 27 

Cause and Effect 34 

The Atonement 38 

Faith 44 

«*The Glory thftt Excelleth " 45 

Notes 51 

A ppendix 61 

II ^OB, A Prince of the East; and His In- 
spired Epic 75 

The Prince of the East 82 

Its Authorship 87 

Satan 91 

Elihu 94 

Providence 97 

Sovereignty 100 

Suffering loi 

Immortality 107 

(vii) 



viii Contents, 

Page 

Its Spirituality 109 

Its Place in the Canon no 

When Written 112 

Where Written 113 

The Family 116 

Its Intellectual Eminence 119 

Pope Gregory on Job 123 

III. The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ 131 

The Key 133 

The Divine Majesty 139 

The King of Glory 141 

The Lion of Juda 144 

The Ascension 148 

The Wine Press 151 

Satan Overthrown 158 

The Catastrophe 159 

Battle Hymns 161 

Symbols 163 

The Judge 165 

Justice and Mercy 170 

God's City 174 

Notes 177 

The Transfiguration 180 

The Resurrection 184 

IV. The First Resurrection 188 

The Easter Aurora. . . f. r^'.'-r; 211 

Dies Irae '.' 212 

V. The Ascension of Our Lord 214 



Introduction. 



Is it not possible to construct an arch that 
would cover the entire space between religion 
and SCIENCE, one that would connect and ce- 
ment the two? 

The sensation of being at rest, when in fact 
we are moving through space in one direction 
a thousand miles an hour, and in another direc- 
tion sixty thousand, is in evidence of the utter 
unreliability of our mental impressions. The 
deception is aided by everything around : the 
trees are quiet, maybe not a twig moves, for 
there seems to be no wind, though we are go- 
ing fast enough to make all nature an yEolian 
harp. Then, too, we think we are standing 
upon our feet, vertically, whereas we are like 
flies on the ceiling, walking feet upward ; if we 
are up, the Chinese are down ; if they are up, 
we are down ; but whether up or down, we 
know no difference. The whole earth seems 
to be still and resting upon solid foundations, 
only the stars and the moon and the sun seem 

(ix) 



X Introduction . 

to be moving ; though, in fact, they are still, 
and we are moving. So far from being solid, 
we rest upon the "empty place," upon thin air, 
hung up over depths fathomless. How vast 
the wisdom that could devise a system of mo- 
tion and rest, of emptiness and solidity, for the 
comfort and habitation of intelligent life, so 
complete and so complicate ! And how infinite 
the power that could create, start, and hold up 
such a system of worlds without weariness or 
waning from the "beginning" until now! 

But how may one be sure that the astrono- 
mers are correct in all their statements in re- 
gard to the celestial mechanism, the roundness 
and motion of this earth? Why, by the alma- 
nac which tells in advance the month, day, hour, 
minute, and second of an eclipse, a year before 
it takes place — indeed, many years before, if 
necessary. By telescopic observation and alge- 
braic equation, by parallax and geometry, by 
mathematical calculation, Kepler and Newton, 
Laplace and Copernicus have fixed the shape 
of the orbits of planets, the rates of their mo- 
tion, their distances, their measurements and sol- 
id contents. Yet they have stretched no lines, 



Introduction . xi » 

only imaginary ones, by which they arrive at 
these tremendous and accurate truths. What is 
the secret of their power ? It is that the mathe- 
matics of the human mind corresponds to that 
of the heavens. The same One who created 
man created the heavens and the earth. Na- 
ture was submitted to human thought, and man 
was endowed with powers of reason adequate 
to the subHme labor of discovering the wisdom 
and power and presence of God in nature. 

It would seem impossible to apprehend the 
world, in all nature, and not be able to appre- 
hend its Creator. " Canst thou by searching 
find out God ; canst thou find out the Almighty 
unto perfection ? " Yet such is the fact. St. 
Paul, in his history of faith (Heb. xi.), sets 
forth, among its achievements, the ability to 
understand God's method of creating and fram- 
ing all visible things out of that which does not 
appear — something out of nothing ; that by his 
word the worlds were framed. The efforts of 
the most advanced scientific mind to conceive 
of creation are seen in the introduction of the 
principle of growth, as illustrative of the force 
which originated the universe. The difficulty 



>xii Introduction. 

seems to be the starting point of such a force. 
Was it an Q%^^ a seed, or a jelly ? 

Not only an inability to discover the Al- 
mighty appears, but a desire not to know, lest 
it should prove a person ! This personal knowl- 
edge, not speculation, that "He is" (Heb. xi. 
6) is declared to be a resultant upon the gift of 
faith, a supernatural personal apprehension of 
the Divine person, the Maker of all things. To 
believe that God exists, and is a rewarder of 
those that diligently seek him, is and was an 
absolute necessity at the earliest hour of human 
history : the hour when Abel obtained the wit- 
ness that his sacrifice was accepted, the period 
of Enoch's translation, when before his disap- 
pearance he had the testimony that he pleased 
God : this was the instant when God added to 
man's natural powers the gift, potentially, of su- 
pernatural perception and conscious knowledge 
of the Almighty. 

If there need be a mathematical correspond- 
ence between the human mind and the celestial 
universe to enable man to measure the mechan- 
ism of the skies, is it not reasonable to suppose 
that higher powers must needs be imparted to 



Introduction. xiii 

man to understand the heavenly things — the 
upper realm of intelligent being? To accept 
the personality of God, the Maker and upholder 
of all things, that he is the " Word of God " — 
the Christ ; to believe that he has offered " one 
sacrifice for sins forever " ; that he has resided 
in the world, and now sits in heaven — a man, 
a divine-human person ; that he has loved me, 
and died for me, and has, by his Spirit, wit- 
nessed the fact to me, all this can only be by a 
supernatural belief, which is natural belief raised 
to a higher power, by the "operation of God," 
and that is faith. 

Whatever comes within the range of our nat- 
ural powers is outside of the region of faith ; 
for faith only exists in the region of the impos- 
sible. So long as the eye or the mind can grasp 
the object, it belongs to the purely natural field 
of human intelligence, and is neither strictly in- 
visible nor future. But "faith is the evidence 
of things not seen, and the substance of things 
hoped for." It supplies the wants of a spiritual 
life, an apprehension of truths that no thought 
could discover and an experience that only the 
" Spirit of truth " could reveal.*^ ^ . . . 



xiv Introduction, 

A consciousness of the personality of God 
would seem to lie entirely beyond the precincts 
of earth ; but when we read that " He was in 
the world, and the world was made by him," 
the wonder is that "the world knew him not." 
Or when we learn that "He had by himself 
purged our sins," and that he now sits at the 
right hand of the Majesty on high, the wonder 
is that a world of sinners is not drawn to him 
by the loadstone of a mighty love. The love 
of man's heart can only move toward a per- 
son, not toward a principle, however sublime, 
not toward height or depth, or angelic regions ; 
not, it may be, toward the Creator, as only the 
Maker of all things, but toward hirn who is 
Father of men, of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
Christ ; toward him by whom we have re^ 
ceived the atonement. 

Faith would be worth little to us if it did not 
"work by love." We are made to love, to love 
persons ; we were constituted with ties of 
blood, with relationships of protection and de^ 
pendence, stronger than death, sweeter than 
life. These mysterious natural ties are but the 
T-rehide to the still more wonderful spiritual 



Introduction, xv 

ties between us and our God ; for " he is not a 
God of the dead, but of the living ; for all live 
unto him." How strongly are these ties ac- 
cented in Christ's last interview^ and prayer 
for the disciples (John xvii. 14), "that the love 
wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, 
and I in them. . . . Father, I will that they 
also whom thou hast given me be with me 
where I am ; that they may behold my glory 
which thou hast given me." 

Carrollton, La., February 11, 1899. 



I. 

The Creative Glory in Its Two Distinct 
Realms — The Natural, The Moral. 

From a human standpoint the greatest of 
all problems is that of the presence of the 
Son of God in this world — a point in cre- 
ation so small as to be at the distance of 
Sirius, and in comparative size, scarcely 
more than a single ray of light: Who was 
not barely present, but abode here in per- 
son, in speech, action, and passion; nor 
simply abode, but upon leaving the earth 
bore away with him, into an eternal life, 
his manhood and ours. There can be no 
greater *' problem"; save only the Son of 
God in Gethsemane — Gabbatha — Gol- 
gotha ! Any problem of earth that for its 
solving secures such Presence becomes an 
infinite wealth to humanity. No wonder 
then that " the things " which *' angels de- 
sired to look into" were the " sufferings of 
Christ, and the glory that should follow ' ' 

(1) 



2 Studies of Bible Truths, 

Two Realms. 
These two — the moral universe, and the 
natural — are far apart in their creative 
glory. The apostle has separated them by 
the order of time in the creation of man — 
**HGwbeit that was not first which is spir- 
itual, but that which is natural; and after- 
ward that which is spiritual" (i Cor. xv. 

46). 

The natural universe is the realm of One 
will; the moral universe is the realm of 
Two wills : (') the will of the Lawgiver, and 
the will of man to whom the law is given. 
The realm of one will is as distinct from 
the realm of two wills as ** the heavens and 
the earth" are distinct from **the law and 
the prophets." The lack of those who 
have attempted a Theodicy has been a clear 
definition of these realms, which, while ap- 
pearing intimate, are really far apart. One 
may ask, What divides them? Are they 
not the creation of One Mind ? If we know 
the laws of nature, their wisdom, order, 



The Creative Glory. 3 

stability, have we not an exact statement of 
the Divine will in the realm of grace? are 
not its laws as fixed, and were they not as 
wisely determined in advance and as easily 
calculated, as the angles and curves of a 
celestial mechanism? 

Moral law is flexible, natural law is fixed ; 
the one illustrates the other. Moral law is 
indivisible, pressing with its whole weight 
upon each offense: '* He that offends in 
one point, he is guilty of all" (James ii. 10). 
Natural law goes by measure and weight, 
and is therefore divisible. Moral goodness 
is the assent of man's will with the will of 
God; moral evil is the dissent of man's 
will from the will of God. 

The school that would relieve the moral 
universe from the cast-iron necessity of nat- 
ural law finds its citadel in the constitution 
of the will ; that it is a cause, therefore free ; 
that it cannot be fixed and free, no more 
than a geometric square can at the same 
time be a triangle ; that a conscious freedom 



4 Studies of Bible Truths, 

could not exist in the atmosphere of abso- 
lute necessity, and in that of absolute truth, 
at the same instant. 

The Will. 

The will is so early an expression of 
man, on his mother's lap, that any defini- 
tion of it would be but a waste of words. 
Whether it be the will of a responsible be- 
ing subject to law, or the will of the Creator 
himself, it is the supreme expression of per- 
sonality, of conscious personal existence. 
Two wills imply two persons. (^) The 
realm of two wills is that in which God and 
man cooperate — the will of man with the 
will of God. The realm of one will is that 
in which God's will is the one ever-pres- 
ent, all-determining principle ; impossible of 
change, except by Jehovah himself. 

What then can be farther apart, theolog- 
ically, metaphysically, naturally, morally, 
than these realms? The one cannot be 
measured by the other; the one was de- 



The Creative Glory. 5 

clared by Christ to be the least conceivable 
expression of the stability of the other; that 
in its firmness the world was as nothing to 
the word of God. The Master has put 
these two realms so far apart that no meta- 
physician may wisely venture to merge them 
in any system of speculative theology. The 
one includes the sum of angelic and super- 
angelic being; and all those of the yet 
higher plane, the redeemed, whether in 
heaven or earth. These are they who, 
while conscious of freedom, have lived and 
obeyed; have suffered and loved. The 
other includes all the imponderables : elec- 
tricity, light, heat, gravity, and all chemical 
affinities; all forces that hold the weight 
of moving worlds together; all those vital 
forces which keep animate natures to their 
physiological bounds, whether of (^) in- 
stinct, or reason, or other subtile sense; so 
that the bloom of spring, or the harvest of 
autumn, the color of the rose, the whiteness 
of the lily, the nest of the bird, the flight of 



6 Studies of Bible Truths. 

the crane, the roar of the lion, the wax of 
the honeybee, the ** flower basket" of the 
silicious sponge, are as unchangeable as the 
spectrum of stars or the orbits of planets. 
Here the Divine mind reigns supreme; 
whether amid dews and butterflies (^) or 
amid the illimitable spaces of the Milky- 
Way, that river of worlds released by the 
hand of the Spirit from the womb of the 
morning. 

The Realm of Nature. 

The order of nature must be to every one 
the earliest and weightiest lesson of life. 
The sun rising daily, holding his speed 
through the sky, and then going down in a 
bed of gold and crimson. The moon steadily 
growing from a bow of silver to a full round 
shield, and then, night by night, changing 
back again, becoming less, and presently 
disappearing altogether. The tide rising, 
wave after wave, on the shore, until it is 
full; then in the same measured way fall- 



The Creative Glory, 7 

ing off to low tide. The spring with its 
opening bud and leaf, then the full bloom 
of summer, and then autumn with its bil- 
lows of grain, all ready for the sickle. All 
which gives the impress of a law too great 
to be disturbed. Even if one should die, 
these changes would go on. The moon 
would shine on the sea, just as it now does. 
In fact, the very stars that Job saw, Orion 
and Arcturus, and the Pleiades, we see. 
And Abraham and David watched the Seven 
Pointers to mark the passage of time, and 
needed no better timepiece. This mighty 
motion overhead, so far, so high, so steady, 
fills the soul of man with the thought of an 
infinite Life and Power somewhere. Can 
all this go on forever; and how long has it 
been going on this way? This dome of 
quenchless fires, and clusters of stars, all 
marching with the even step of armed hosts, 
at the command of an unseen Majesty, 
across the field of the sky — it is the first 
lesson that God gives the shepherd boy. 



8 Studies of Bible Truths. 

The glory of the Maker of worlds, his eter- 
nal being, his bounty, his strength, are all 
written on the face of this upper deep, in the 
bright sea, and in the rich fields, and would 
fill the mind of a boy with the thought of 
heaven : whether there were flocks and pas- 
tures there, or only persons; by what route 
one might come to such a height and dis- 
tance ; whether a cloud could carry us in 
sight of God's home ; and if so, would it be 
town, or only country? would there be high 
buildings with towers, and princely palaces 
for great people, built of what — diamonds, or 
rubies, or pearls? or would they be like the 
air, or solid like stone ? And who can won- 
der if that boy became a poet, who daily 
saw such fields of light and beauty? 

God is pleased to reveal himself in such 
large letters even in the earliest lessons of 
life, that before anything else the spirit of 
man may be filled with the glory of the 
Creator. The earth by itself is not large 
enough to give full expression of his wis- 



The Creative Glory. 9 

dom, so the work of his hands in other 
worlds is added, that the mind of a boy 
even may be lifted above the ground upon 
which he stands, and drawn out toward our 
immortal home. It would be quite differ- 
ent with a heathen man or boy. The mo- 
tion of lights, orbs, and clouds would sug- 
gest life; and he would look to see where 
it was most likely to center, or in how many 
distinct things it could be lodged. Each of 
these things, stronger than himself, would 
be the object of awe, the dread mystery of 
an unknown power. 

"What a mercy, when with the revelations 
of the firmament there goes ** the testimony 
of the Lord, which is sure, making wise the 
simple " ! (') The work of God and the 
word of God explain each other. The law 
is not nature, though many come to think 
that nature is itself law, and law is nature. 
From this strange perversion, many other- 
wise wise men see no God, excepting in 
the machine-like movement of nature ; will 



lO Studies of Bible Truths, 

ing to get rid of a Divine Person, they rea- 
son that once a start was given, and a law 
fixed, and after that only law remains. All 
the unbelief in the world sooner or later 
takes this shape, that under this pretext it 
may secure the liberty of living without re- 
sponsibility to a Divine Person. In ten 
thousand things it would seem there could 
be no change. The pine tree cannot change 
to a cedar; the persimmon cannot become 
a peach ; a gourd will never round up into 
a pear. Some strange law of life, as strong 
as that which rules the laboratory of the 
universe, holds each of these plants to its 
own foliage, flowers, and seed. And if we 
could go back to the garden of Eden, we 
should find the roses, lilies, camellias, vio- 
lets, four-o'-clocks, tulips, and the sweet 
olive, with their tints and perfumes just as 
we now have them. Amid all the whirls, 
earthquakes, and disturbances of sea and 
land, these frail beauties have held their 
own for six thousand years, and have 



The Creative Glory, ii 

brought to us the fragrance of that sinless 
region, built by God for the entertainment 
of the most beautiful man and woman that 
ever breathed the breath of heaven. 

And as to the birds : how could the pea- 
cock's rich train be more beautiful? and 
surely it was never less. The wren, the 
sparrow, and the swallow build as near 
the house and in the exact style of their an- 
cient custom ; nor is there any likelihood of 
change. The hen with her chicks can yet 
give lessons of care and solicitude to the 
young housekeeper, as well as to erring 
Jerusalem. No beast, no bird, has mate- 
rially changed. The leopard has the same 
spots. The elephant, of ungainly build, yet 
swift in motion and instinct, is still a beast 
of burden or an ally in war. The horse, 
the dog, the ox, and the sheep remain 
the companions and conservators of man. 
The destructive creatures, that constitute 
the police of nature, have not changed their 
hideous features. The whale and the sea- 



12 Studies of Bible Truths, 

lion, the seal and the dolphin, continue to 
give life and majesty to the illimitable deep: 
the cod, the mackerel, the herring, the mul- 
let recur, year by year, to their hatching 
and feeding grounds, and supply all nations 
with their exhaustless wealth of food. The 
invisible elements of oxygen, hydrogen, ni- 
trogen abide in all their movable yet im- 
movable strength, for the security of animal 
and vegetable life. Even upon the dull 
clods of inorganic matter there abide the 
grace lines of His touch and a record of His 
final purpose in creation. 

This natural universe is a changeless ex- 
pression of the One Will. For who could 
divide with him the weight of Jupiter or 
Neptune, and countless worlds that are 
*'the dust of his balance"? Who else can 
hold back the typhoon, or the storms that 
gather for a thousand miles upon the seas 
and shake their iron coasts? who can check 
the throb of the earthquake, or stay the 
flow of lava ? whose will can give a limit to 



The Creative Glory. 13 

the sun's photosphere, or say to its light- 
nings, *'Go," that they may say, *'Here 
we are : 

The Moral Realm. 

But far away from these fields of magnifi- 
cent expression there is the yet more won- 
derful realm of *' the excellent glory " ; that 
which is to remain when the foundations 
of the earth and the heavens shall perish. 
** For they shall all wax old as doth a gar- 
ment, and as a vesture shalt thou fold them 
up, and they shall be changed." 

The realm of angels and of men, how 
enduring! and on the other hand, how 
transitory is all else in the comparison ! 
** If we consider," says Bentley, '* the dig- 
nity of an intelligent being, and put that 
in the scales against brute inanimate mat- 
ter, we may affirm, without overvaluing 
human nature, that the soul of one virtu- 
ous and religious man is of greater worth 
and excellence than the sun and his 
planets." 



14 Studies of Bible Truths, 

God has been pleased to give fo man his 
own breath and a personal will : but with it 
a law of harmony with the Divine will ; or 
if otherwise, a law of death — that is, of 
freedom with responsibility. Without such 
''a law of liberty," it is doubtful if God 
ever created immortal beings. (^) The an- 
gels that were overthrown, and are held in 
chains of darkness, left their first estate; 
they wanted to be something higher than 
the stars of God, but were cast down with 
Lucifer. Their fate establishes the fact of 
an original freedom. 

This responsibility of a moral nature met 
Adam and Eve on the instant of their crea- 
tion. *'The Lord planted a garden east- 
ward in Eden; and there he put the man 
whom he had formed. And out of the 
ground made the Lord God to grow every 
tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good 
for food. . . . And the Lord God com- 
manded the man, saying, Of every tree of 
the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of 



The Creative Glory. 15 

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day thou 
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." All 
law is condensed into this simple statement 
of God's will. How long the folly of the 
first man and woman was gathering we 
know not; possibly threescore years and 
ten. Let us hope that they dwelt in the 
favor of God a long while. Their dissent 
from his will we may be sure was not an 
accident. It was doubtless intelligent and 
willful, if not deliberate. It arrayed man 
against his Maker, and put him in concert 
with the tempter; it asserted man's person- 
ality at the cost of his life. No wonder the 
sky darkened, or that thunder rolled round 
the garden. Some think the heavens and 
the earth should have collapsed, rather than 
such a bankruptcy should have overtaken 
the fortunes of humanity. 

The Arch of Mercy. 
But now it was that mercy's arch was 



1 6 Studies of Bible Truths, 

thrown far over the fathomless abyss that 
separated man from God. A Son was 
promised — the unity of a Divine life with 
the human — and the defeat of man's enemy 
forever assured. In the natural universe 
such an event as the fall could not have oc- 
curred, unless God should hold himself re- 
sponsible for disobeying his own will. An 
effort to make God responsible for Adam's 
fall has been the struggle of the centuries ; 
not merely between believers and unbeliev- 
ers, but also in the theological metaphysics 
of spiritually-minded men. It has been held 
that the fall was but a necessary step in the 
direction of God's ultimate purpose of re- 
demption ; that before the foundation of the 
world his wisdom ** ordained it unto our 
.glory." 

That God arranged, before the creation 
of a being free to stand or fall, a plan that 
in either event should display his own lov- 
ing nature, we cannot doubt. But that 
would only be in accord with his infinite 



The Creative Glory, 17 

wisdom, and is very far from the compelling 
force of a definite means to a definite end. 
What his sublime purposes were, in the 
event of Adam's obedience, we shall know 
when we see the Redeemer in his incarnate 
glory. Possibly the same result might have 
been attained by a different route; one 
without the shame, peril, and agony of a 
dying life, or the darkness of Calvary, or 
the martyrdom of myriads *' of whom the 
world was not worthy." It is certain that 
whatever arrangements were made to meet 
a possible disaster, when it came God was 
grieved at his heart, and *'it repented him 
that he had made man on the earth " (Gen- 
esis vi. 6). Language could not more ex- 
actly define the distance between God's 
will and man's disobedience. Not a few 
find that the will of man while seeming free 
to himself is not really so ; constructively ij) 
free, but nothing more. Such freedom 
makes God responsible for the result, and 

removes the whole transaction from the 

2 



1 8 Studies of Bible Truths. 

moral to the natural universe. It enlarges 
the one at the expense of the other. 

The school of Scotch metaphysicians, 
represented by Dean Mansel, does not hold 
God responsible for the moral quality of a 
divine purpose; as something beyond our 
just powers of estimating it, because v^e are 
incapable of conceiving the extent of the 
natural universe ! This of course brings 
every question of human freedom within the 
precincts of the One Will. Such theorists 
would leave nothing but a region of abso- 
lute necessity. All would be held by its 
adamantine chain. The moral universe 
would cease for lack of expression, and the 
moral nature of God himself be held in 
doubt. («) 

A region where seraphs cry, '* Holy, holy, 
holy is the Lord of hosts ; the whole earth 
is full of his glory," and veil their faces the 
while — if they do this by constraint, and 
not of their own great will — would be but 
part of the natural universe. 



The Creative Glory, 19 

Why Free? 
This all leads to the plain question, Why 
did God create a universe that is so far 
away from his own control? The answer 
is, that Love, in its nature, is not of neces- 
sity; it must be free, or else cannot be at 
all. God wills to be the supreme object of 
love. (^) He delights in the anthems of 
angels, but lives in the love of those who 
have loved his Son. Those mighty hosts 
that were led forth to witness the laying of 
earth's corner stone, that by anthem and 
chorus celebrated this act of infinite love, 
and "shouted for joy," composed the hab- 
itation that God delighted to dwell in. And 
it is among such free and grateful intelli- 
gences that Christ, by the Spirit, has pre- 
pared the mansions of the redeemed. 

The Flexibility of Moral Law. 

The conduct of Israel through the desert 
is one long and vivid illustration of the na- 
ture of moral law. The fourteenth chapter 



20 Studies of Bible Truths. 

of Numbers specially recounts the changes 
in God's purpose, as provoked by the re- 
bellion of the people: **And the Lord said 
unto Moses, How long will this people pro- 
voke me ? and how long will it be ere they 
believe me, for all the signs which I have 
shewed among them? I will smite them 
with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and 
make of thee a greater nation, and mightier 
than they." But Moses would not suffer it. 
He importuned God to dismiss the thought 
— *' Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of 
this people, according unto the greatness of 
thy mercy, as thou hast forgiven this peo- 
ple from Egypt even until now." And the 
Lord said: *' I have pardoned according to 
thy word. . . . Surely they shall not see 
the land which I sware unto their fathers, 
neither shall any of them that provoked me 
see it. . . . Your carcasses shall fall in 
this wilderness, and your children shall wan- 
der in this wilderness forty years. . . . And 
ye shall know my breach of fromiseJ'^ 



The Creative Glory. 21 

The illustration, on a national scale, of 
this flexibility is in the history of Nine- 
veh. (^^) By God's command, and by the 
force of mighty miracles thereto added, 
Jonah gave notice, *'Yet forty days, and 
Nineveh shall be overthrown." **But the 
people of Nineveh believed God, and pro- 
claimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from 
the greatest of them even to the least of 
them. . . . And God saw their works, that 
they turned from their evil way, and God 
repented of the evil that he had said he 
would do unto them, and he did it not." 
(Jonah iii. lo.) 

The effect of man's repentance upon the 
purposes of God is the philosophy of the 
Scriptures — specially those of the New 
Testament: ** Repentance toward God, and 
faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ," is the 
exact text of the moral law, in its sublime 
flexibility. (^^) But while God secures the 
freedom of man, he is careful to secure his 
own freedom. **It is a faithful saying, If 



22 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

we be dead with him, we shall live with 
him ; if we suffer, we shall also reign with 
him." Faithful and wonderful is this iden- 
tity with Christ, sacrificial, vital, and eter- 
nal; but the sentence ends, ** if we deny 
him, he also will deny us; if we believe 
not, yet he abideth faithful; he cannot deny 
himself." He does not hold himself bound 
to unbelief, or to covenant-breakers. He 
cannot deny himself ! Such is the freedom 
of moral law. 

The History of Freedom. 

So important a fact as the perfect free- 
dom of man in his relation to the will of 
God must have a history of obedience or 
disobedience, with its attending results. 
Lying as it does at the base of man's na- 
ture, and at the foundation of the moral 
universe, it must needs exist in objective 
expression. It was therefore seen in the 
garden of Eden, and in the terrible experi- 
ence of man outside of that blissful region. 



The Creative Glory. 23 

Though long years intervened between 
man's expulsion and the full expression of 
God's displeasure, yet by and by the hour 
came ! The seas became a winding-sheet 
for the solid land and for all that lived on 
it; tornadoes plowed the deep as one might 
plow a field; lightnings filled the air, the 
earth, and the sea with their threads of fire; 
death was in every cubic inch of matter. 
Great sea monsters died, with the trilobite 
and the nautilus, and in the instant they 
died left the fossil record of their existence. 
Amid the groans and cries of nature, the 
voice of man could not be heard. The 
depth opened down to the bowels of the 
earth, and the height opened upward to the 
throne of God. Upon that wide terror a 
single bark floated off, in which were shut 
up the fortunes of a single family. Its helm 
was the hand of God. Under flash and 
storm, above wave and current, it went 
forth to its appointed place; leaving far be- 
hind a continent filled with all that God had 



24 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

done to make man happy, but steering 
steadily for another continent, where there 
might be a new beginning of responsible 
being. 

Amid the universal curse, one man, Noah, 
had found favor with God. To suppose 
that there was no other principle at work 
in this huge disaster, but the Divine Will, is 
to suppose that God created the human 
race only to destroy it — an inconceivable 
thought. The time between Adam and 
Noah was not less than sixteen hundred 
years, say about the time between Constan- 
tine and this century. During this period 
the race multiplied, and the continents were 
filled with beasts, flocks, and herds, and 
the deep with creatures of incredible size 
and ferocity. Nature was unchecked in 
her production of life and food. Men of 
great stature appeared, and of great age. 
Two generations were enough to cover the 
antediluvian period. Adam lived nine hun- 
dred and thirty years, Methuselah nine 



The Creative Glory. 25 

hundred and sixty years, and Noah six hun- 
dred years, before the flood. If all animal 
life bore the same proportion to the life of 
man that it now does, we can scarcely esti- 
mate the herds of buffalo and horses that 
ranged over the two Americas. Starting 
from one center, they pushed their way to 
every height and plain, in countless myriads. 
But the flood came and destroyed them all ! 
They too left their fossilized bones and teeth 
to tell the story of their existence. 

Despite the violence and corruption of 
earth's inhabitants, God in mercy held na- 
ture to its beneficent laws. The spirit of 
Christ the while strove day by day with man 
— as Jonah with Nineveh. Great preachers 
of the judgment made but little impression 
upon men removed nine hundred years from 
natural death. Before them stood that mar- 
velous structure, larger than our largest 
ocean steamer; built of oak and pine, and 
copper-fastened ; of superb model and fin- 
ish ; more convincing than the impassioned 



26 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

sermons of Noah that some huge catastrophe 
awaited mankind. And yet as it will be in 
the days of the coming of the Son of man. 
so was it in the days of Noah: ** they ate, 
they drank, they married wives, and were 
given in marriage until the day that Noah 
entered into the ark, and the flood came 
and destroyed them all." At the edge of 
this awful abyss of ruin we may well believe 
that **the judgments of God are a great 
deep"; we may see that *'by one man's 
offense death reigned by one; and we may 
measure thereby the reign of grace and the 
gift of righteousness, by which we shall 
reign in life by one — ^Jesus Christ." 

The record of this event imbedded in 
Genesis bears upon its face the exact and 
plain statement of a seaman ; it is much like 
the log book of the Santa Maria, the flag- 
ship of Columbus, on its voyage toward a 
new world. The items noticed of the ship's 
behavior, the events of that long and peril- 
ous drift, of the grounding on Ararat, and 



The Creative Glory, 27 

the discharge of its living cargo, are such a 
record as the marine insurance offices of 
England examine after every equinox. It 
was probably the oldest history that fell into 
the hands of Moses while writing Genesis. 

The Lord of Glory. 

In his arguings against Job, Zophar de- 
scribes the futility of man's intellect, in its 
searchings after God: '* Canst thou find 
out the Almighty unto perfection? It is 
high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper 
than hell, what canst thou know? the meas- 
ure thereof is longer than the earth, and 
broader than the sea." 

That which is matter of revelation has 
been placed beyond the reach of discovery. 
This intellectual mirage is the I^ata Mor- 
gana^ where metaphysicians see wonders in 
the clouds that overhang the deep. And 
not only they, but theologians, from the 
days of St. Augustine to those of Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton, having no clearly defined 



28 Studies of Bible Truths. 

line by which the kingdom of nature can be 
distinguished from the kingdom of grace, 
illogically force one upon the other in their 
solution of the moral universe. (^^) But 
there is a Center in which both the natural 
universe and the moral meet; where the 
glory of the one is but tributary to the glory 
of the other. In Christ their vast content 
of law and life, of matter and spirit, meet. 
He that made an eye commands light; he 
that raised the dead commands life ; he that 
walked on the sea commands the universal 
law of gravity; he that pronounced the 
Sermon on the Mount is the One Lawgiver; 
he that spoke to the " Father " in the pres- 
ence of the Greeks, and was answered by a 
voice from heaven, is the Son of God; he 
that cast out devils was the King of Israel; 
he that was manifest in the flesh was *' the 
fullness of the Godhead bodily." No won- 
der then if we find in him the true Cosmos 
— the universal, all-comprehensive order and 
harmony; embracing the realm of intelli- 



The Creative Glory. 29 

gences and the realm of nature, heaven and 
earth, God and man, matter and spirit: 
^''For in him all things consist. ^^ (J^) And 
lest one should draw back from engrossing 
in a Person space and time, all wisdom, all 
power, all that is abstract, and all that is 
concrete, let him read the eighth chapter of 
Proverbs, by Solomon. 

Truth is, all atheism, materialism, pan- 
theism, fatalism, positivism, and unbelief 
in its many phases, are engrossed and in- 
trenched in the denial of a Divine Person 
in nature. And on the other hand, Christ 
came to show that there was a Divine Per- 
son at every point of the universe. 

In the night, on Galilee, the disciples 
realized that the Creator of the world was 
in the boat, and that they were alone with 
him! **And they feared exceedingly, and 
said one to another, What manner of man 
is this?" Such sublime demonstration of 
so great a truth as " God manifest in the 
flesh'' could be given only by the Mighty 



30 Studies of Bible Truths, 

Teacher himself, in the wildest part of 
nature. 

In the detailed account of the cure of the 
man born blind, Christ revealed his com- 
mand of light by creating an eye; and of 
the **true Light," by telling the man that 
it was the Son of God who had healed him. 
The revelation of the Sonship, with all that 
it implies, demanded confirmation on the 
** highest part of the earth"; even among 
the sources of light, and amid those galaxies 
and clusters of suns which lie far out on the 
road toward heaven. This miracle trans- 
ports us into those distant fields of ether, 
and brings us to the abode of the ** Father 
of lights." In this instance the Saviour re- 
veals the final cause of the man's blindness; 
that the glory of Christ might be revealed 
in healing him, body and soul; that he 
might be a conscious witness to the Son of 
God throughout the ages to come. 

One of the difficulties in separating be- 
tween the moral and the natural universe is 



The Creative Glory. 31 

in the fact that their lines cut each other in 
the constitution of man. Nature goes for- 
ward in all the functions of his physical 
economy, from the instant of birth until 
death, without his thought or consciousness, 
as in all animals. But it is not so with his 
moral nature. That Light *' which lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world" 
seizes upon the law of Horeb, at its first 
mention, as a law of life and death. So 
with the Sermon on the Mount; one might 
as soon think to quench Sinai by casting it 
into the Red Sea, as to shake off this law 
from the mind. 

In healing the man of Gadara the Son of 
man seems to have descended, by his pow- 
er, into depths as fearful to contemplate as 
those awful heights to which he reached in 
healing the blind man. The disciples might 
have asked with much propriety. Why was 
this man of Gadara so fearfully infested 
with devils? The subject of the tyranny of 
Satan is in itself beyond human discovery, 



32 Studies of Bible Truths, 

and was therefore a fit matter of revelation 
by Christ. The disease of epilepsy offered 
an approach to a theory on this problem, 
but the whole depth of this marvelous abyss 
waited upon the detecting power of the Son 
of man. Humanity could not be introduced 
to the plane of fallen spirits, in the depths 
of hell ; but the possession by them of the 
bodies of men might be allowed to intensify 
the horror of sin and display the extent to 
which the fortunes of men had been dam- 
aged by angelic malignity. 

The condition of a spirit held in eternal 
bondage to Satan might be measured by the 
body of one poor wretch in which a ** le- 
gion " of them had kenneled. Such a num- 
ber {6^666^ must have disposed themselves 
upon his every fiber and nerve as a trichina. 
No wonder the Saviour left the multitude 
where he was healing many, when he heard 
the cry of one in the mountains and tombs 
of Gadara writhing under this knotted pow- 
er of evil. Though it was at the close of a 



The Creative Glory, 33 

day of toil, he said, " Let us go over to the 
other side/' This he did, relieved the pos- 
sessed, and returned directly; showing that 
the relief of this one poor wretch was the 
objective point in view. The entire passage 
transcends the powers of the human imagina- 
tion. This semi-responsible creature's light 
intermitted; now he was a man, yet pres- 
ently a wild beast that could neither be 
tamed nor held. One can see him in the 
smithy while the irons were being fastened 
with many a rivet. Yet soon again he is 
the terror of the mountain. The fiends as- 
sumed to be but one. But the Saviour's 
question, like Ithuriel's spear, detects the 
imposture: **What is thy name?" The 
answer is a startling one: ^* Legion, for we 
are many; send us not away, send us into 
the swine." Christ by a word hurls them 
into the home of Abaddon, but suffers them 
to go by the route they select. With shriek 
and plunge they went, by the way of the 
herd and the sea, to a fathomless abyss. It 



34 Studies of Bible Truths. 

was a culminating instant of ruin and of de- 
liverance for humanity. By a single move- 
ment, the Son of God had lifted the man 
of Gadara from the gates of hell to those 
sublime regions where the Spirit panoplied 
him and sent him forth to tell the story of 
Christ's compassion. 

St. Paul himself had no more wonderful 
story to tell, of arrest, conversion, and apos- 
tleship. Probably this terminated the pos- 
session of men's bodies by Satan, and de- 
livered earth from its huge tyranny. 

Cause and Effect. 

God could impart to man a will as free as 
his own. And lest man should mistake his 
own free will for God's, the divine will was 
written on tables of stone by his own hand, 
and given to Moses. In the first instance, 
in the garden of Eden, the law was given in 
the objective form of a *' tree of the knowl- 
edge of good and evil," and of a ** tree of 
life." Whether on trees or tablets, the law 



The Creative Glory. 35 

of God was objectively stated. The law of 
the natural universe is within the creature; 
that of the moral universe is without. In 
this region of moral law no place is found 
for the law of cause and effect — 'that mighty 
chain whose adamantine links hold all na- 
ture to its appointed bounds. Within its 
grasp there is no freedom, and there can be 
none. Even the planets that move on such 
yielding cushions, with all their majesty and 
momentum, cannot vary either course or 
speed the millionth part of a spider's thread 
in a thousand years. The heavens declare 
this glory of God. And it is no wonder if 
the human intellect should think to find 
throughout the entire creation the same ex- 
act machinery controlling spirits as well as 
spheres. 

But besides this firmament of fixed law, 
there is a domain where its unyielding qual- 
ities are not permitted to enter, where an- 
other law reigns of equal harmony : that in 
which *'the word of God makes wise the 



36 Studies of Bible Truths, 

simple, and his statutes rejoice the heart; 
in which the fear of the Lord endures for- 
ever, and his judgments are true and right- 
eous altogether." In this moral empire 
there is more evidence of divine wisdom in 
an infant's hand than in all the mechanism 
of the heavens. It is the region of love, of 
hope, of memory, of peace, of escape from 
the power of darkness into the kingdom of 
God's dear Son ; above all, of absolute con- 
scious dependence upon God. (^^) 

If the law of cause and effect is wholly 
outside of the moral universe, no wonder 
that Hobbes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Hegel, 
Spencer, et al., find themselves lost in this 
' * labyrinth of the free will. ' ' They attempt 
a region that to the intellect of man is as 
impassible as the vacuum is to the wings of 
a dove. In 17 10 appeared the only com- 
plete and philosophical work of Leibnitz, 
^'Bssais de Theodicee sur la honte de Dieu, 
la libertS de Vhomme^ et V origine du mal,^* 
undertaken at the request of the late Queen 



The Creative Glory. 37 

of Prussia, who had wished a reply to 
Bayle's " Opposition of Faith and Reason.'' 
(Encyclopaedia Britannica,vol.xiv.,p.420.) 
His solution of this problem of evil was to be 
found in the nature of the ''•monad. ^' Mr. 
Stewart says: *' After studying with all pos- 
sible diligence what Leibnitz says of his 
fjtonads^ in different parts of his works, I 
find myself quite incompetent to annex any 
precise idea to the word as he employed it. 
It is simply the ' protoplasm ' of the evolu- 
tionists." 

One of the grand purposes of the Son of 
God while upon earth was to bring man 
consciously out of this region of despair, 
and raise him to that of faith; to show man 
that he was to find life in the covenants of 
God with man. He showed that over the 
justice of God there presided an infinite 
mercy, and a love that spared no sacrifice 
in order to save mankind. This he followed 
up with the tragedy of his own death, and 
with the power of his own resurrection. 



38 SUidies of Bihle Truths. 

By all this we can realize that we are in a 
region of divine eloquence, in which mind 
persuades mind; where there is the full 
play of a nature as free as God's own na- 
ture ; where in the hour of a kingly triumph 
he cries, with tears: ** How oft, O Jerusa- 
lem, would I have gathered thee, and ye 
would not! " 

The Atonement. 
We cannot expect therefore to bring the 
atonement under the law of cause and ef- 
fect, so as to insure the salvation of those 
for whom Christ died, nolens volens. Nor 
can we prove the doctrine of substitution, in 
its sublime justice, by any chain of intel- 
lectual sequence. Else where would be 
room for faith, even that justifying faith 
which has its sole object in Christ crucified? 
All that can morally support the truth is set 
forth — evidence enough to convince a world 
— but nothing more : no mathematical claim 
as being of the number redeemed, nor mer- 
cantile claim as being bought by the pay- 



The Creative Glory. 39 

ment of so much precious blood. All these 
ideas of some necessary vinculum between 
the Crucified One and the soul of man 
have no place in the Spirit's application of 
Christ's death to the repenting sinner. The 
thought that we live in a region of faith car- 
ries the mind constantly up to God, and 
makes him our daily study. That all things 
are possible with God, is the sufficient an- 
swer to a world of prayerful anxiety; and 
the thought that a true faith lives only in 
the region of the impossible, is often the 
sufficient stay to a wavering heart. 

A power intended to be the instrument of 
discovery in the realm of nature is likely to 
be quite distinct from the one employed in 
the realm of spirit. And this we learn is 
the case. Faith is the instrument for un- 
derstanding God; and the intellect is the 
instrument for discovery of the laws of na- 
ture. (^^) Through a long period faith was 
the main reliance of the patriarchs : in times 
of partial revelation, of fierce antagonism 



40 Studies of Bible Truths. 

with the aliens, of bondage, of torture, of 
absolute failure in all human resources, un- 
til it achieved a history of proof equal to any 
human demand. This tried weapon Christ 
has perfected, and has united it with his 
death as the only ground of an acceptable 
righteousness ; and is alone capable of giv- 
ing relief to a guilty conscience — ** whom 
God hath set forth to be a propitiation 
through faith in his blood." Could such a 
truth be left in trust to the intellect of man, 
to be discovered as a law of nature ? What 
power of the mind could reach to this truth, 
or could value it when discovered? (^^) 
Not the reason, but the heart, is the region 
of faith — * * with the heart man believeth 
unto righteousness. . . . Keep thy heart 
with all diligence, for out of it are the issues 
of life." 

The bodily presence of the Son of God 
brought the Godhead within range of intel- 
lectual apprehension . But as had been fore- 
told in Isaiah, *' having eyes they saw not, 



The Creative Glory. 41 

having ears they heard not ' ' ; nor with their 
hearts did they respond to him. He was to 
them but the demonstrator of unbelief. His 
miracles excited wonder, but no real trust 
in the truth of his divine nature. Still the 
body of Christ gave to men an idea of the 
personality of God, in that it showed the 
personality of the Son. It gave a tangible 
expression of God's holiness by the life of 
Christ ; by its lofty purity, its faultless obe- 
dience, its unwavering faith, its universal 
sympathy, and its intense hatred of evil. 
The priesthood after the order of Melchize- 
dek, the offering once for all for sin, the 
power of a resurrection, the ascension to 
God's right hand, all demanded the pres- 
ence of the body, the bones and the flesh 
of the Son of man. 

These were the truths to be inwrought 
by the Holy Spirit into the fiber of our spir- 
itual life; but unless they had actually ex- 
isted, they could never have been used to 
that end. They were to find entrance to 



42 Studies of Bible Truths. 

the heart of man from without, and not to 
be evolved from within. The Spirit would 
witness to the spirit of man these wonders 
of life; so that man could know them as a 
gift, from a new and divine source. The 
two were confirmatory of each other; but 
they were distinctly two, and not one ; God's 
Spirit, and man's. The amazing flood of 
light that Christ brought with him we should 
suppose would have been convincing, but 
it was not. The natural power of man 
seemed not equal to the reception of spir- 
itual truth. 

One should not therefore be surprised at 
the despair of an assumed agnosticism, 
which because it cannot know all things 
professes to know nothing — that is, in the 
direction of Spirit and Christ; or that it 
scouts the idea of revealed truth, or of the 
presence of a Divine Person on the earth, 
or the fact of a miracle. (^^) No, it will not 
condescend to entertain any truth which 
professes to be outside of the region of fixed 



The Creative Glory, 43 

law. For consistency's sake, it refuses to 
consider the things that are ; only things as 
they ought to be. This supercilious being 
does not confine itself to scientific investiga- 
tion, but presumes to measure a moral uni- 
verse by geometric and algebraic equation. 
Fatalism, starting from the same source, re- 
solves all in the straight-jacket of natural 
law ; it allows no flexibility of divine pur- 
pose. It gives no place to conscience, be- 
cause only the Maker of all is answerable 
for all. Nothing, therefore, is bad, because 
bad is but the shady side of good. Well 
has the prophet pronounced a '^zvoe^^ 
against all who school themselves this way, 
in the face of conscious freedom. ('') This 
is the logical result of assuming that the 
realm of nature is the whole of creation; 
that conscience is nothing, that revelation 
is nothing, spirit nothing; that there is no 
future, in fact no real present; that all ex- 
ists only in dream and imagination. This 
disintegration of man by himself is but the 



44 Studies of Bible Truths. 

obliquity of an evil nature, through which 
man hopes to quiet those fears that are 
themselves in evidence of his future ac- 
countability. 

Faith. 
Faith makes no account of either time or 
space. It penetrates both, but like a tele- 
scope its power is measured by the distance 
of its object. The faith of Abel and Enoch, 
of Job and Abraham, surprises, because 
they discerned the Messiah at the earliest 
period of sacred history, and received the 
witness that by faith they pleased God. 
This explains the cooperative method of 
Christ's system: that without him we can 
do nothing, and that without man he does 
nothing; that he has committed to men the 
work of salvation ; that upon their faithful- 
ness the kingdom of heaven waits ; that the 
light of the glory of God, in the face of 
Jesus Christ, goes no faster than the mes- 
sengers of the gospel; if they linger, it 
lingers; while the shadows of death may 



The Creative Glory, 45 

hold in their somber embrace one-half of a 
world which has been bought by his blood ! 
There can be no greater mistake than to 
suppose that God will save men with or 
without human instrumentality. When the 
Son became incarnate, the whole system of 
Christ became essentially human. In the 
midst of his great labors while on earth, he 
never lost sight of faith as the essential 
quality of spiritual life. Unless he could 
excite faith in those whom he came to save, 
he could do nothing. Unbelief was a bar- 
rier the Son of God could not pass even in 
his great mission to save. 

''The Glory that Excelleth.'' 

The conception of a universe of persons 
who should be conscious of God; persons 
recognizing the love of him who gave them 
life, and endowed them with the wealth of 
his own happiness; conscious of a personal 
dependence upon him, was worthy of the 
Almighty. Only Infinite Love could con- 



46 Studies of Bible Truths. 

template the possible cost of such a uni- 
verse, and be willing to pay it. 

Could the Creator afford to follow those 
who in very willfulness should abuse the gift 
of life, and wreck its vast inheritance ? could 
he afford to pursue them to ** the lowest parts 
of the earth," in order to bring them to re- 
pentance? We should think not. But the 
thought of a universe in which every person 
should be held to his bosom by such a tie was 
worthy of One who so loved the world that 
he gave his only-begotten Son to save it. (^^) 

A universe of intelligent beings is in- 
deed '* the glory that excelleth ' ' ; the one to 
which all else of the Divine purpose is trib- 
utary. It is the '* glory that rem aineth"; 
all else is transitory. In thinking of the 
pains God has always taken to provide his 
children wdth a home, the mind naturally 
recurs to the garden of Eden, in which were 
so many inviting fruits, and cedarn alleys; 
so many beautiful creatures, and pebbly 
brooks; a place fit for fellowship with the 



The Creative Glory. 47 

Father of men and of angels ; and we ask, 
What became of this Eden, when Adam 
was driven out and cherubim with flashing 
swords kept the way of the tree of life ; did 
it fall into decay? The inspired record 
has preserved it in all its charm, that our 
thoughts may be ravished by the story of 
its beauty and fragrance. And it does aid 
us in conceiving the place that Christ has 
prepared for his people. 

Only less than the hour that created Eden 
was the hour that introduced the Babe in 
the manger to the shepherds; when the 
light of the throne roused them from their 
slumbers and circled the landscape of Beth- 
lehem with its glory ; when shepherd boys 
heard the rushings of myriads of wings and 
the mighty anthem that rang up from earth's 
altar to the court of heaven, winding its 
melody back into the heights of Godhead, 
uniting men and angels in the one sympho- 
ny, *' Glory to God in the highest, and on 
earth peace, good will toward men." 



48 Studies of Bible Truths. 

The revelation of Christ was perfected 
historically in the heights of the greater 
Hermon, at midnight, a few weeks before 
his crucifixion. He stood on "the holy 
mount," in the glory which he had with the 
Father before the world was. The radiance 
of Godhead interpenetrated and interfused 
every vein and fiber of his body. His limbs 
were solid light; his countenance shone as 
the sun ; his vestment was as white as the 
abyss of holiness. It was the inaugural in- 
stant of his majesty, announced long be- 
fore: **Yet have I set my King upon my 
holy hill of Zion." In Eden, Gethsemane 
was first announced. The prophetic state- 
ment was then made of the will of God and 
the will of man, in mutual anguish and in 
perfect assent. Its fulfillment was the tri- 
umph of Infinite Love over all other divine 
or human purpose ; the love of the Son for 
the Father, and the love of the Father for 
the Son: **And he was withdrawn from 
them about a stone's cast, and kneeled 



The Creative Glory, 49 

down, and prayed, saying, Father, if thou 
be willing, remove this cup from me : nev- 
ertheless, not my will but thine be done. 
And there appeared an angel unto him, 
strengthening him. And being in an ag- 
ony, he prayed more earnestly; and his 
sweat was as great drops of blood falling 
down to the ground." In the words of 
Dr. W. Burt Pope, of England, ''God's 
own Theodicy^ a vindication of himself, is 
exhibited in the free gift of the Second 
Adam." (^^) 

**The whole race of man condemned in 
Adam receives in Adam also the promise of 
recovery for all. And in the Second Adam, 
the special Seed of the woman ^ the recovery 
of the whole race is effected, inasmuch * as 
in Adam all died, even so in Christ shall all 
be made alive.' And thus, in truth, the 
mystery of sin can only be cleared up by 
the mystery of redemption ; whilst both ex- 
hibit the justice of God, brought out into 
its fullest relief only under the light of 



5© Studies of Bible Truths. 

his love." (Speaker's Commentary, atoI. 
i., p. 48.) 

'Tis mysl'ry all! th' Immortal dies! 

Who can explore his strange design? 
In vain the firstborn seraph tries 

To sound the depths of love Divine! 
'Tis mercy all! let earth adore: 
Let angel minds inquire no more- 

(Hymn 459 : C. Wesley.) 



NOTES. 

Human Will and God's Will Alike in Moral Law^ 

Note (i), page 2: " Of a sensation which I have, an- 
other may be the source: the movement which I un- 
consciously execute, another may propel; but of the 
thinking, the choosing, the willing, which I do, there 
can be but one subject, and that subject is myself: 
they cannot be predicates at the same time of two 
minds, God's as well as my own. . . . Human will 
is the same as God's will, that is free determination; 
and is so regarded in moral law: will is the same." — 
(Dr. J. Martineau, Study of Religion, p. 175.) 

The Will of Man and of God: Two Causes. 

Note (^), page 4: "If God is personal, we should 
expect him to reveal himself in the domain of person- 
ality. In a sphere of created spirits, by whom he can 
be believed in, known, and loved. We should expect 
him to prepare for himself, in the midst of the king- 
dom of nature, his own holy kingdom." — (Bishop Mar- 
tensen, Dogmatics, p. 84.) 

"All cosmic power is Will, and all cosmic will is 
His." — (Dr. J. Martineau, Study of Religion, p. 139.) 

"The Dual disposition of our universe, between our- 
selves and all else, acquaints us then with two causes, 

(51) 



52 Studies of Bible Truths, 

and no more : and the Divine cause administers all that 
is not vacated on our behalf." — {Ibid.y p. 171.) 

Creature Instinct; not Knowledge. 

Note (3), page 5: " I cannot reconcile myself to a use 
of language which identifies phenomena so unlike as 
the blind instinct of the caterpillar and the foresee- 
ing and discriminating intellect of man; and which 
separates processes so allied, naj blended, as the moral 
choice of the higher principle of action, and the moral 
effort to give it effect — jou cannot attribute to the in- 
sect, to the salmon, and to the migratory bird, a ^«<?w/e<i[^e 
of what they are about, of the future, even posthumous, 
offspring they are providing for, of the distant latitudes 
they seek, and the relation between the ends they 
pursue and the methods adopted for their attainment. 
This absence of knowledge from operations which we 
could perform only by means of it needs to be marked 
by some distinctive term; and in calling them instinct- 
ive as opposed to voluntary^ we mean to claim for the 
latter precisely the elective and foreseeing element which 
characterizes self-conscious agency." — (Dr. J. Marti- 
neau, Study of Religion, p. 211.) 

Instinct not Inherited. 
Note (^, page 6: "In those creatures in which in- 
stinct seems most fully developed, it is impossible that 
it should have grown by cultivation and successive in- 



The Creative Glory. 53 

heritance. In no animal is it more observable than in 
the bee: but the working bee onlj has the remarkable 
instinct of building and honej-making so peculiar to 
its race. It does not inherit that instinct from its par- 
ents, for neither the drone nor the queen bee builds 
or works ; it does not hand it down to its posterity, for 
itself is sterile and childless. Mr. Darwin has not 
succeeded in replying to this argument." — (Speaker's 
Commentary, Genesis, p. 43.) 

The English Bible. 

Note (*), page 9: " Three hundred years ago, by one 
of the greatest acts of real government ever exhibited, 
the public reading of the whole Bible was imposed 
upon Englishmen; and by the public reading of the 
lessons on Sunday alone the chief portions of the Bi- 
ble, from first to last, have become stamped upon the 
minds of English-speaking people in a degree in which 
as the Germans themselves acknowledge they are far 
behind us." — (Henry Wace, JVmeteenth Century , May, 
1889.) 

Religion a Volitional Worship of God. 
Note (^, page 14: "Personal religion is not com- 
plete till it assumes the form of religious volition. 
Through feeling and knowledge God seeks to draw 
men into his kingdom ; but only through the will 
does religion become on the part of man an actual 



54 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

worship of God." — (Bishop Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 
II.) 

Two Wills. 

Note C), page 17: "This is simply the old sugges- 
tion that bj dispensing with a moral world, he might 
have excluded moral evil: what in that case he would 
have included that was worth having, only the brutes 
could tell. As it is, there are two Agents from whose 
concurrent or conflicting Wills all history arises: and 
in estimating the character of each we must not charge 
upon one the preference shown by the other, but look 
simply to his own end in view and the plain drift of 
his activity." — (Dr. J. Martineau, Study of Religion, 
p. 128, vol. ii.) 

" While there is One will in nature, there are two 
that meet in man." — {Ibid.y p. 172.) 

Persons are not "Things." 
Note (8), page 18: "It tacitly assumes that a necessi- 
tated absence of evil must be in itself good, or alone 
good, so that only impossibility of its ever making its 
appearance is consistent with the moral ideal of a uni- 
verse. But such a universe would be a world of non- 
moral things^ or automata, and would exclude the ex- 
istence ol persons ^ who as moral beings must be able 
to make themselves immoral. The real question there- 
fore Is, whether the existence ot individual persons is 
Itself inconsistent with the divine goodness. A person 



The Creative Glory. 55 

who is under an absolute necessity of willing only what 
is good is not a person in the sense of possessing mor- 
ally responsible freedom." — (Venture of Theism, Loti' 
don Quarterly, No. 187, p. 85.) 

Holiness and Freedom. 

Note (9), page 19: "It is because He is holy, and 
cannot be content with an immoral world where all 
the perfection is given and none is earned, that he re- 
fuses to render guilt impossible, and inward harmony 
mechanical: were he only benevolent, it would suffice 
to fill his creation with the joy of sentient existence; 
but being righteous too, he would have in his presence 
beings nearer to himself, determining themselves by 
free preference to the life which he approves: and 
preference there cannot be unless the double path is 
open. To set up, therefore, an absolute barrier against 
the admission of wrong, is to arrest the system of 
things at the mere natural order, and detain life at the 
stage of a human menagerie, instead of letting it cul- 
minate in a moral society." — (Dr. J. Martineau, Study 
of Religion, p. 102.) 

" Faith, finally, is the profoundest act of the will, 
the profoundest act of obedience and devotion." — 
(Bishop Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 11.) 

Calvinism and History. 

Note (^0), page 21: "From Calvin's point of view, 
man has no history, so far at least as history includes 



56 Studies of Bible Truths. 

the idea of a temporal and free life, in which what is 
as jet undecided will be decided. All 15 decided al- 
ready; existence, life, destiny — every individual man 
with his distinctive lineaments of character, and out- 
ward circumstances — already have been present be- 
fore the eye of the omniscient God with a necessity as 
fixed and certain as the paths in which the planets 
move: . . . for in reality Christ is come into the 
world to fulfill an eternal election for the fall and ris- 
ing again of many — for the rising again of those who 
were created for the resurrection, for the fall of those 
who were created for destruction." — (Bishop Marten- 
sen, Dogmatics, p. 364.) 

The " Lord of the Ages." 

Note (^i), page 21: "Taking therefore for our start- 
ing point, The idea of creation as a free revelation of the 
love of God, we exclude the dead conception of the 
divine unchangeableness which represents God as too 
exalted, too lofty, to come into contact with time, that 
is, with the actual life of his creatures; too exalted, one 
ought indeed to say, to create at all. We also equally 
exclude the idea of a God who is himself sunk and lost 
in the great stream of time. For as God has subjected 
himself to the conditions of history not from any neces- 
sity of nature but from free love, he remains at every 
moment of his mundane life the 'Lord of the Ages.'" 
— (Bishop Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 125.) 



The Creative Glory, 57 

Science Cannot Reach God. 
Note (^), pages 28, 40: "It is well that we should be 
convinced on rational grounds that science simply as 
science can never reach God. To him who insists on 
a purely scientific solution of the problem of man's 
life and destiny and will accept no other, there is no 
solution; and for this reason: the highest concerns of 
humanity, the greatest objects with which the soul has 
to do, cannot even be apprehended by the scientific 
faculty. If apprehended at all, it must be by the exer- 
cise of quite another side of our being than that which 
science calls into play. * No telescope will enable us 
to see God.* . . . Indeed, scientific men who are 
also religious will be the first to acknowledge that 
their faith in God they did not get from science, but 
from quite another source; although this faith, when 
once possessed, invested with a new meaning and il- 
lumined with a higher light all that science taught 
them." (Principal Shairp, Culture and Religion, p. 73.) 

The True Cosmos. 
Note (i^), page 29: "Jesus Christ is the most sacred, 
the most glorious, the most certain of all facts ; arrayed 
in a beauty and majesty which throws the * starry 
heavens above us and the moral law within us' into 
obscurity, and fills us with ever-growing reverence 
and awe. He shines forth with the self-evidencing 
light of the noonday sun. He is too great, too pure, 



58 Studies of Bible Truths, 

too perfect to have been invented bj anj sinful and 
erring man. . . . He is the most precious gift of a 
merciful God to a sinful world. Mankind could bet- 
ter afford to lose the literature of Greece and Rome, of 
Germany and France, of England and America, than 
the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the glory of the 
past, the life of the present, the hope of the future." — 
(Philip Schaff, The Person of Christ, p. 143.) 

Conformity to God's Will. 

Note (i*), page 36: "The animating principle in the 
best men is that 'their soul is athirst for God.' The 
desire to have their will conformed to his will, the 
hope that they shall yet be brought into perfect cym- 
pathy with him, is what in their estimate makes the 
chief good of existence. They believed that they 
could know something of the character of God, and 
that they might reasonably aspire to grow in likeness 
to that character." — (Principal Shairp, Culture and 
Religion, p. 68.) 

Physical Faith Implies a Moral Trust. 

Note {}^\ page 39: "When I try to think out an 
ethically skeptical conception of the universe, I find 
myself becoming scientifically and practically para- 
lyzed. Intellectual system in the universe disappears 
in the dissolution of moral faith in it, with the con- 
sequent dissolution of all faith, even that without 
which a human understanding cannot be so applied to 



The Creative Glory. 59 

presented phenomena as that thej may be recognized 
as things. Man is rescued from universal skepticism 
through trust finally in the divine synthesis. The in- 
dividual ego and the outer world are unintelligible, 
unless God is tacitly presupposed." — (Philosophy of 
Theism, Fraser, p. 36.) 

" The Miracle of God in Nature." 

Note (i^), page 42: "The weakness of the old argu- 
ment was its failure to recognize 'the constant mira- 
cle of God in Nature,' and to treat God merely as an 
antecedent cause of the world-system. But so to un- 
derstand the divine causality is to reduce God to a phe- 
nomenon or event, supposed to be reached in the 
course of the causal regress from one phenomenal 
antecedent to another. There is no stopping, how- 
ever, in the infinite regress which the conditions of 
thought impose upon us. . . . No true cause can 
be reached in this way at all. It is not hy proceeding 
backward in time, and refunding one natural phenom- 
enon into another, that we can lay hold of God. The 
nature of true causality is revealed in our own moral 
experience; and applying this to the divine existence 
and the relation of God to the world, we are enabled 
to realize him as a present fact — as the supernatural 
sustaining Power immanent in all existence, and op- 
erative in all change — as Professor Fraser expresses it, 
'the eternal presence of Providential Mind.'" — {Lon- 
don Quarterly, No. 187, p. 73.) 



6o Studies of Bible Truths, 

Reply to an Agnostic Scientist. 
Note P), page 43: "Do jou really hold that the 
world with which science deals is the whole world of 
existence? If there is a world of truth outside, or per- 
haps rather inside, of that which science is cognizant 
of, is no part of it to be believed till science has made 
it her own, and given us scientific grounds for believ- 
ing it? You say that yovi do not find God in the world 
with which you have to do. Is, however, this world 
of yours the only world that really exists? Is it even 
the most important world — important, that is, if you 
consider all that man is, all that history proves him to 
be and to need?" — (Principal Shairp, Culture and Re- 
ligion, p. 190.) 

The True Adam. 

Note Q-\ page 46: "The true Mediator 'must set 
forth human nature in its purity, in its susceptibility 
to God ' ; in other words, he must be the true Adam. 
At the same time, while revealing the depths of human 
nature, he must also reveal the depths of the divine 
love — that is, he must be the revelation of the perfect 
self-communication of the divine to the human nature. 
God must be in him, not merely relatively, in finite 
degree, but absolutely and fully. . . . As the Per- 
son who renders it possible not merely for a single 
nation, or a single age, but for the entire human race 
and every separate individual, to develop his humanity 
in his right relation to God, and whose activity is ac- 



The Creative Glory. 6i 

cordingly destined to surmount every limit of time and 
space, Christ is more than the founder of an historical 
religion — he is the world-redeeming Mediator who 
must be conceived as holding a necessary and eternal 
relation both to the Father and to mankind." — (Bishop 
Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 260.) 

Redemption. 

Note (i^), page 49: "Divine love, that knew from 
eternity the possibility of the Fall, found also from 
eternity the way of Redemption. In free grace and 
love the Father gives up the Son to humiliation, obe- 
dience, and suffering; and by his willing obedience the 
Son, as the Second Adam, satisfies the demands of holy 
and righteous love, offers up the sacrifice which our 
sinful race should have offered but could not, drank 
to its dregs the cup of suffering for sin which must 
needs be emptied that the growth of sin might be re- 
traced and destroyed and that a new life might begin." 
— (Bishop Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 307.) 



APPENDIX. 

Opinions in Support 0/ the Wide Distinction between the Universe of 

Persons and the Universe tj/'TniNGs; betiveeti Natural 

and Moral Laiu / from Distinguished Writers. 

The Spiritual Higher than the Intellectual. 
" It is a fact that we all feel the intellectual part of 
man to be 'higher' than the animal, whatever our 



62 Studies of Bible Truths. 

theory of its origin. It is a fact that we all feel the 
moral part of man to be ' higher ' than the intellec- 
tual, whatever our theory of either may be. It is a 
fact that we all similarly feel the spiritual to be * high- 
er' than the moral, whatever our theory of religion 
may be. There is no doubt that intellectual pleasures 
are more satisfying and enduring than sensual — or 
even sensuous. And, to those who have experienced 
them, so it is with spiritual over intellectual, artistic, 
etc. This is an objective fact, abundantly testified to 
every one who has had experience; and it seems to in- 
dicate that the spiritual nature of man is the highest 
part of man — the (culminating) point of his being." — 
(Thoughts on Religion, Romanes, pp. 152, 153.) 

There is no Cause for Boasting in Unbelief. 

" It is much more easy to disbelieve than to believe. 
This is obvious on the side of reason, but it is also true 
on that of spirit, for to disbelieve is in accordance with 
environment of custom, while to believe necessitates 
a spiritual use of the imagination. For both these rea- 
sons, very few unbelievers have any justification, either 
intellectual or spiritual, for their unbelief. Unbelief 
is usually due to indolence, often to prejudice, and 
never a thing to be proud of.^' — (Thoughts on Reli- 
gion, Romanes, p. 155.) 

First Principles are Known by Intuition, and 
NOT BY Reason. 

" We have seen in the Introduction that all first prin- 



The Creative Glory. 63 

ciples, even of scientific facts, are known bj intuition, 
and not by reason. No one can deny this. Now, if 
there be a God, the fact is certainly of the nature of a 
first principle ; for it must be the first of all first princi- 
ples. No one can dispute this. No one can there- 
fore dispute the necessary conclusion, that, if there be 
a God, he is knowable (if knowable at all) by intuition, 
and not by reason. Indeed, a little thought is enough 
to show that from its very nature as such reason must 
be incapable of adjudicating on the subject, for it is a 
process of inferring from the known to the unknown. 
Or thus: it would be against reason itself to suppose 
that God, even if he exists, can be known by reason; 
he must be known, if knowable at all, by intuition. 
Observe, although God might give an objective view 
of himself — e. g., as Christians believe he has — even 
this would not give knowledge of him, save to those 
who believe the revelations genuine; and I doubt 
whether it is logically possible for any form of objec- 
tive revelation of itself to compel belief in it. Assur- 
edly one rising from the dead to testify thereto would 
not, nor would letters of fire across the sky do so. But 
even if it were logically possible, we need not consider 
the abstract possibility, seeing that, as a matter of fact, 
no such demonstrative revelation has been given." — 
(Thoughts on Religion, Romanes, p. 156.) 
The Reality of Conversion. 
"This doctrine of the inward Christ, 'Christ in us 



64 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

the hope of glorj,' is a doctrine of which the New 
Testament is full. Mystical as it is, and transcending 
as it does our faculties of intellectual analysis, it has 
been ridiculed as fit only for enthusiasts, in a rational- 
istic age such as the last century ; but every revival of 
vital Christianity brings it to the front again, and roots 
it anew in the consciousness of serious and devout 
Christians, though they be 'plain men' and unimpas- 
sioned. It will become real to each man in turn, as he 
meditates and acts upon it; and in it he will find the 
explanation of three very commonly felt difficulties." 
' — (The Incarnation, Gore, p. 240.) 

Objective Proof of the Reality of Conversion. 

" St. Augustine, after thirty years of age, and other 
Fathers, bear testimony to a sudden, enduring, and ex- 
traordinary change in themselves, called conversion. 
Now this experience has been repeated and testified to 
by countless millions of civilized men and women in 
all nations and all degrees of culture. It signifies not 
whether the conversion be sudden or gradual, though, 
as a psychological phenomenon, it is more remarkable 
when sudden and there is no symptom of mental ab- 
erration otherwise. But even as a gradual growth in 
mature age, its evidential value is not less. 

"In all cases it is not a mere change of belief or opin- 
ion. This is by no means the point: the point is that 
it is a modification of character, more or less pro- 
found. 



The Creative Glory. 65 

" Seeing what a complex thing is character, this 
change therefore cannot be simple. That it may all 
be due to so-called natural causes is no evidence 
against its so-called supernatural course, unless we beg 
the whole question of Divine in nature. To pure ag- 
nostics the evidence from conversions and regenera- 
tion lies in the bulk of these psychological phenomena, 
shortly after the death of Christ, with their continu- 
ance ever since, their general similarity all over the 
world, etc." — (Thoughts on Religion, Romanes, p. 173.) 

The One Satisfying Portion. 

"The negative evidence is furnished by the nature 
of man without God. It is the roughly miserable, as 
shown by Paschal, who has devoted the whole of the 
first part of his treatise to this subject. I need not go 
over the ground which he has so well traversed. 

"Some men are not conscious of the cause of this 
misery; this, however, does not prevent the fact of 
their being miserable. For the most part they conceal 
the fact as well as'possible from themselves, by occu- 
pying their minds with society, sport, frivolity of all 
kinds, or, if intellectually disposed, with science, art, 
literature, business, etc. This, however, is but to fill 
the starving belly with husks. I know from experi- 
ence the intellectual distractions of scientific research, 
philosophical speculations, artistic pleasures; but am 
also well aware that even when all are taken together 
and well sweetened to taste, in respect of consequent 



66 Studies of Bible Truths. 

reputation, means, social position, etc., the whole con- 
coction is but as high confectionery to a starving man. 
He maj cheat himself for a time — especially if he be a 
strong man — into the belief that he is nourishing him- 
self bj denying his natural appetite ; but soon finds he 
was made for some altogether different kind of food, 
even though of much less tastefulness as far as the 
palate is concerned. 

" Some men, indeed, never acknowledge this ar- 
ticulately or distinctly even to themselves, yet always 
show it plainly enough to others. Take, e, g.^ ' that 
last infirmity of noble minds.' I suppose the most ex- 
alted and least carnal of worldly joys consists in the 
adequate recognition by the world of high achieve- 
ments by ourselves. Yet it is notorious that 

It is by God decreed 
Fame shall not satisfy the highest need. 

" It has been my lot to know not a few of the famous 
men of our generation, and I have always observed 
that this is profoundly true. Like all other 'moral' 
satisfactions, this soon palls by custom, and as soon as 
one end of distinction is reached another is pined for. 
There is no finality to rest in, while disease and death 
are always standing in the background. Custom may 
even blind men to their misery, so far as not to make 
them realize what is wanting; yet the want is there. 

" I take it then as unquestionably true that this 
whole negative side of the subject proves a vacuum 



The Creative Glory. 67 

in the soul of man which nothing can fill save faith in 
God. Now take the positive side. Consider the hap- 
piness of religious — and chiefly of the highest religious, 
i, e., Christian — belief. It is a matter of fact that be- 
sides being most intense, it is most enduring, growing, 
and never staled bj custom. In short, according to 
the universal testimony of those who have it, it differs 
from all other happiness, not only in degree, but in 
kind. Those who have it can usually testify to what 
they used to be without it. It has no relation to intel- 
lectual status. It is a thing by itself, and supreme. So 
much for the individual. But positive evidence does 
not end here. Look at the effects of Christian belief 
as exercised on human society — first, by individual 
Christians on the family, etc.; and, second, by the 
Christian Church on the world." — (Thoughts on Reli- 
gion, Romanes, pp. 160-162.) 

God and Man in One Person. 

*' In the person of the Incarnation we see how true 
it has been all along that man is in God's image; for 
this is man, Jesus of Nazareth. His qualities are hu- 
man, love and justice, self-sacrifice and desire and 
compassion; yet they are the qualities of none other 
than the very God. So akin are God and man to one 
another that God can really exist under conditions of 
manhood without ceasing to be, and to reveal, God; 
and man can be taken to be the organ of Gk)dhead 



68 Studies of Bible Truths. 

without one whit ceasing to be human." — (The Incar- 
nation, Gore, p. 127.) 

The Only Progress. 

There is no progress in nature, but much in man. 
He has the vast field of fixed law to investigate, and 
each discovery of that which he knew not before is 
accounted progress. Electricity has not changed since 
its creation, but the discovery of its light and motion, 
being brought within man's available resources, is as 
new as if they were just created. 

Millions of stars have been photographed upon bro- 
mide of silver plates, which were never known to ex- 
ist, though constituting the nebular mists of the Milky 
Way ever since the first creative hour. They have 
not been added to nature, only to our knowledge of 
nature. 

What infinite perfected fields were created in the 
earth, sea, and heavens for the entertainment and em- 
ployment of the human intellect; as food was then or- 
dered to support the life of every beast, bird, and in- 
sect, day by day, during its allotted period of exist- 
ence. 

May we not look forward to the realm of immortal 
life for a yet grander provision for the support and 
employment of the myriads of spirits that daily escape 
to those shores? The nearer we get to God, the more 
shall we realize his fullness to be "of all in all." 
-(J. C. K.) 



The Creative Glory. 69 

Dean Mansel's Speculation on Man's not 
Knowing God. 

" Some thirty-three years ago, a great controversy 
was originated in this pulpit by a Bampton lecturer, 
who took for his subject, 'The Limits of Religious 
Thought.' Dean Mansel held in little esteem the pre- 
tensions of the Hegelian school in Germany to criticise 
by the standard of rationality the contents of divine 
revelation. Revelation, he held, was a fact. We had 
evidence that it had really been given, and certified by 
miracles. On this evidence all the stress must be laid. 
Granted that it is cogent, we must accept the revela- 
tion as it has been given. We have not the faculties 
necessary to criticise what God has been pleased to 
tell us about himself: ' Nay, but, O man, who art thou 
that repliest against God?' 

"Unfortunately, Mansel did not confine himself to 
reemphasizing Butler's strong protest, as valuable to- 
day as in the last century, against the easy overesti- 
mate of the powers of the human mind to judge a pri- 
ori of what is probable in a divine revelation. He went 
further, and exposed himself to the charge of denying 
that we have, or can have, any real and direct knowl- 
edge of God himself at all." — (The Incarnation, Gore, 
pp. 125-128.) 

The Office of Reason, Distinct from the Office 
OF Faith. 

It is reasonable that there should be a faculty for 



70 Studies of Bible Truths, 

each realm of creation — that for Nature, and that for 
Spirit. The intellect has its vast range in nature, and 
has gone almost to the boundaries of heaven, but has 
not found God : no, nor has been able even to conceive 
of creative power; nor to discover anj moral truth 
since Moses, or from Moses to Christ. Its efforts to 
construct any satisfactory idea of God himself have 
been only failure, only Brahmanism, Buddhism, Pan- 
theism, Materialism, Positivism, Agnosticism, Deism, 
Stoicism, Evolution, and such like vagaries. •' Canst 
thou by searching find out God.'* canst thou find out 
the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heav- 
en; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst 
thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the 
earth, and broader than the sea." This challenge of 
Job the intellect of man has never met. — (J. C. K.) 

The Problem of Creation. 
To separate sharply between creation and growth 
ends the problem of creation. What can science do, 
in describing the first moment of creation? It cannot 
even conceive of the first word, the connection be- 
tween speech and a creation of the "stuff" of the 
earth. Was it by act, idea, or word, that something 
came out of nothing ? The orderly statement by word, 
which preceded every creative act, and then the an- 
nouncement of the completed act, would never have 
occurred to the scientist. Nor would the statement of 
the element of time, that accompanied the act, have 



The Creative Glory. 71 

been made had not the element of time entered es- 
sentially into the work itself. 

Is the work represented as continuous, or as de- 
layed by vast interruptions of space and time? It be- 
gan and went through by short pauses of creative pur- 
pose. 

Let the doubting reader try to think how he would 
make the first single grain of sand; he will find that 
the method of creation contradicts his ideas as much 
as the fact itself. Yet we know that this substance of 
earth must have had an orderly beginning. Speech 
contained God's power then, and has ever since. It is 
the perfection of creative skill. 

Only one equal with God could apprehend the di- 
vine purpose in advance of the creative Word. It 
was in the audience of the sons and stars of God that 
the Almighty One "spake and it was done." And it 
was in response to his word and the concurrent act 
that they shouted for joy, and sang praises to God in 
mighty chorus. It was the word of the Almighty 
holding his power, his wisdom, and his love that re- 
vealed to angels this highest form of communion with 
his intelligent creatures. They never knew before 
the ineffable fullness of Divine speech. It was the 
revelation of a means which by and by was to be 
employed in the creation of the sons of God, and in 
translating men " from the power of darkness into the 
kingdom of God's dear Son." 



72 Studies of Bible Truths, 

If with God " a thousand years is as one daj," and 
" one day as a thousand years," why should not the / 
aw, the timeless One, do as much in one day as would 
in our thoughts require a thousand years? He may 
have had in view the demonstrating that he includes 
time in himself. The principle of growth was intend- 
ed to bring out that which was included in creation, 
but essentially different from it. 

It must not be forgotten that He who speaks the 
world into existence is called the Word of God, possi- 
bly because by his utterance the world was created; 
that he has made everything, "visible and invisible, 
whether angels, principalities, or powers, or thrones, 
or dominions — everything was made by him and for 
him." 

If creation could be taken in by the human mind, 
in the processes of its reason, faith would not be re- 
quired to " understand that worlds were framed by the 
Word of God." 

The facts of nature are in marked contrast with 
their appearance to the mind: (i) that the heavens 
move ; (2) that the earth is still ; (3) that it rests on a 
foundation ; (4) that it is an extensive plain. These all 
need the patient correction which science affords. 
That is, mind corrects mind. 

In every miracle a moral truth is revealed, more 
wonderful than the phenomenon which attends it. 
For instance, the man cured of the palsy: "That you 



The Creative Glory. 73 

may know that there is power on earth to forgive sin. 
. . . Take up thy bed and walk," So in the burning 
bush God speaks: '•'■I am that I am!''' The fire, the ser- 
pent, and the leprous hand simply show God's provi- 
dential regard of Israel. — (J. C. K.) 

Annihilation a Desperate Attempt to Escape 

Wrath. 

When we consider what German pantheism would 
do with the human race, we ought not to hesitate to 
preach the terrors of the Lord, as less even than the 
terrors of men: for (i) they would reabsorb all human 
personality in the Divine Being; (2) they would con- 
sign all men indiscriminately to annihilation. (Schlei- 
ermacher.) Their own terrors of conscience, and their 
conviction of the " One Lawgiver, who is able to save 
and to destroy," conspire to suggest this desperate 
route of escape from the " wrath of the Lamb." This 
is their alternative: the faith of God or annihilation! 
How profoundly false must that mind be which denies 
all sense of sin! It is the quality of sin to destroy 
self and others, to annihilate truth and God. 

More than ever we feel our dependence upon the 
Redeemer's personality. He demonstrates it in the 
presence of every force of nature. He too is the 
person whom no man knows but the Father; whose 
height and depth of personality is acknowledged of 
heaven as of earth, and in eternity as in time. He s 



74 Stitdies of Bible Truths, 

the Son of man who secures to all men and to every 
man an abiding selfhood. 

As creation is of itself the greatest of all miracles, 
agnostics agree that creation is going on now, as at 
first, when " God created the heavens and the earth." 
But can any think that the glory of the peacock has 
been continued, and is being increased continuously? 
Has a single feather been added to its unrivaled beau- 
ty.'' Many strong beasts and fearful creatures, mar- 
velous in their construction, have disappeared; but 
none have been added to the wealth of the animal 
kingdom. Man has lost in vitality; he no longer lives 
whole centuries. What in the heavens above or in 
the earth beneath has gained in vital energy .f* Has 
any mind surpassed or equaled that of Job, in the first 
epic ever written? 

If the human mind has not advanced in thought, 
sentiment, imagination, or in the divine quality of 
speech, surely we cannot in these lower departments 
of creation, lying much farther out from God, expect 
improvement. As to the treasures of light, electric- 
ity, or mineral oil, they are no addition to creation, 
but only the discovery of treasures long since in- 
tended for the endowment of generations as yet 
vinborn. — (J. C. K.) 



II. 

Job, a Prince of the East; and His Inspired 

Epic. 

The Book of Job opens to us the heights 
of heaven, the agonies of earth, and the 
depths of hell, as a human experience; in 
sustained poetic grandeur, beyond every 
other book in the Sacred Canon, excepting 
the last, the epic of **the Lion of the tribe 
of Judah." 

The fall and the flood gave evidence of 

the existence of a power for evil, personal, 

wily, malignant, that claimed the conquest 

of the earth. The strength of this claim 

was still in dispute. Was humanity to be 

at the mercy of this adroit fallen angel? 

How far is he limited by the Creator? Can 

he enter every paradise as he did the first? 

Can a man cope with Abaddon? Where 

is the champion who shall venture against 

this Goliath? 

(75) 



76 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

This problem and its solution are set forth 
by the Spirit in an historic epic, in which 
Job, the Prince of Uz, is the hero. We 
need not wonder that one for whom the 
ages had waited should be presented to the 
courts of heaven ; nor that by the Holy 
Spirit he should be presented, in the sacred 
Scriptures, for the study and contemplation 
of mankind through all the periods of time. 
In the words of the Most High, there was 
**none like him in the earth, a perfect and 
an upright man, one that feareth God, and 
escheweth evil." 

This, therefore, is the theme of this in- 
spired book — a perfect man : one who in the 
sight of God and man is without fault, nor 
yet to be made perfect by a series of intense 
castings and recastings in the crucible of 
life, but one whose quality has received the 
stamp of absolute purity ; one against whom 
and in whom Satan could find nothing. 
The divine personality, the personality of 
Job, and the personality of the prince of 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 77 

evil stand upon the one plane of this drama, 
and are at the base of all its action and pas- 
sion. The appearance of the adversary at 
the assembly of holy angels may surprise; 
but from what assembly has he been absent 
in the last six thousand years? '*Have I 
not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a 
devil?" The conflict between man and 
Satan was to recount upon every field the 
superiority of man ; that man's moral power 
and spiritual grace are more than a match 
for the fallen angel. Job fights in a dark 
room. Though the hosts of God are look- 
ing at him, he cannot penetrate this veil of 
providence. He saw no more than we now 
see, as to the source of all calamity, human 
or superhuman. All great spirits have had 
their encounters with the foe, upon a dark- 
ened field. As, long after, the Son of man 
revealed his might against the tempter, so 
now the patriarch wielded the sword of the 
Spirit, and came forth, as he went in, ap- 
proved of God. 



78 Studies of Bible Truths. 

The trial of Abraham is to be estimated 
in the presence of the triumphs of the 
Church through faith. So is it in weighing 
the act by which Job, for the while, was 
placed within reach of Satan. God was 
the vindicator of his righteous servant in 
the severest test to which earth and hell 
could possibly subject the patriarch ; a test 
that reached as deep as the foundations of 
personal being; that assailed by loss of 
wealth, of family, of friends, of respect, of 
position, and of public favor; that left him 
naked as when he came into the world. 
The Chaldeans, the Sabeans, and the tor- 
nado stripped him of his herds, killed all 
his children, and reduced him from great 
wealth to great poverty in a single hour. 
But he sinned not. His life remained to 
him, and his faith in God was unshaken. 
The angels saw it, and hell saw its own de- 
feat in this one sublime human spirit. 

Satan affirmed that the test did not ex- 
haust his resources; that a man's life was 



Joh^ a Prince of the East, 79 

more to him than all else; that he could 
yet, if permitted, make Job curse God to 
his face. The test was important in show- 
ing the utmost of Satan's power against 
man. So he was permitted to do his worst 
— only life itself to be excepted. 

As Gregory the Great says of Satan, 
*'he exercised with great skill the permis- 
sion he had received. . . . But by the 
many wounds he had inflicted in his cruel- 
ty, he unintentionally furnished as many tri- 
umphs to the holy man." The entire man 
was put to rack. His body was turned into 
a mass of putrid corruption; his friends 
could not approach so contagious and hid- 
eous a disease as the black leprosy. Their 
sympathy came only near enough to chal- 
lenge his character. **No man was ever 
so overthrown by God, in a moment, with- 
out cause ; virtue secures the divine favor, 
but ruin pursues the hypocrite." 

Job replied in all the dignity of a con- 
scious spiritual integrity. He yielded not 



8o Studies of Bible Truths. 

a hair's breadth to his accusers; he knew 
God, and God knew him: *' He knows the 
way that I take — I shall come forth as gold 
tried in the fire." The unconscious bit- 
terness of these royal comforters is mixed 
with sentiments of lofty import, and pre- 
sents for our instruction the intricate, sub- 
tle, seductive nature of Satanic influence: 
to all of which Job simply answers, *'He 
knows the way that I take," and leaves 
their wholesale detraction in the hands of 
God. The agony of his frame, the loss of 
all excepting his love and reverence for his 
Lord, even the loss of his wife's favor, did 
not disturb the boldness of his faith. The 
storm spent itself far below him. He was 
more than equal to his adversary. In the 
presence of his God, his retainers, his wife, 
his friends, his foes, his bankruptcy, his 
ulcers, he yielded nothing, he lost nothing 
of his manhood, but affirmed his knowledge 
of the Redeemer; that after death itself 
had devoured his skin, yet in his flesh he 



Joh^ a Prince of the East, 8i 

should see God, in his own person, for 
himself, and in his own personality; that 
the efficacy of his offerings, as a priest of 
the Most High, would secure his righteous- 
ness, and at the resurrection bring life out 
of death. 

How could there be else than the Divine 
recognition of this great and holy man, in 
the presence of angels and archangels, who 
foreshadowed the cross, the humiliation, 
the purity, the courage of his beloved Son? 
The Holy Spirit, who before the flood wit- 
nessed to Abel's offering, and for three 
hundred years enabled Enoch to keep step 
with God in life, and afterwards in glory, 
and had infused power into the preaching 
of Noah, had since the flood vitalized the 
lesson of that terrible judgment, and af- 
firmed, with increased light, the holiness 
and the mercy of God, through the entire 
patriarchal period. Such persons as the 
royal priest of Uz, Job; the king and priest 

of Salem, Melchizedek; and Abraham, the 
6 



82 Studies of Bible Truths. 

"father of the faithful," are in evidence of 
the intense force of spiritual life that at that 
time presided over the Chaldean, Syrian, 
and Arabian deserts. 

The Prince of the East. 

God had waited for a man ; and the world 
above held its breath at his announcement. 
It was high time. The delay had swollen 
the enemy beyond expression. He essayed 
the conquest of the universe. He already 
claimed it; he was equal to the throne it- 
self. The prophet Isaiah, who dipped his 
pen in the light of the Spirit, could ade- 
quately describe the port and brow of Lu- 
cifer, as he plumed himself against God: 
**Thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend 
unto heaven, I will exalt my throne above 
the stars of God : I will sit also upon the 
mount of the congregation in the sides of 
the north: I will ascend above the heights 
of the clouds : I will be like the Most High." 
But this lofty one was defeated by one who 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 83 

was only a man. Had it been by an angel, 
it would but partially have aided man ; he 
must needs be conquered by man, in the 
sight of men. No general statement of 
such a victory would have sufficed; every 
stroke of this battle was to be in the open 
field of human life. So it had been origi- 
nally promised — "the seed of the woman 
should bruise the serpent's head " — while in 
fierce conflict. 

As no one had been born outside of this 
original decree, was it not time that evi- 
dences of its fulfillment should appear? It 
was therefore matter for angelic anthem, 
that a champion had been found among the 
sons of men who could assure the limitation 
of this fallen angel. It was in evidence 
that humanity had been raised by the prom- 
ise of a Deliverer to the plane of a divine 
sonship; and that a man had been made 
capable of more than a negative resistance 
to evil ; who could give blows against the foe 
that would resound to the gates of hell. 



84 Studies of Bible Truths* 

An event which revived the hopes of 
angels and delivered man from fear was 
doubly satisfactory to the only true God. He 
drew his servant to himself, and spake face 
to face with him as a man might speak to 
his friend. As one might instruct a child, 
he opens to the mind of the patriarch the 
story of creation: the order, the strength, 
the measurements of its mighty survey ; the 
amphitheater of angels attending; the songs 
and shouting with which they received each 
succeeding act, that brought light out of 
darkness and beauty out of chaos. He de- 
scribed to him the birth of the sea, the 
clouds that wrapped about it as a garment, 
the doors and bars by which its proud 
waves were let in and out, and the laws 
which held it to its appointed bounds. He 
showed him the day just opening its eyes, 
as an infant looking into the face of its 
mother, and asked if he had ever seen the 
gates of death or the doors of the shadow 
of death — the last bound of darkness. He 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 85 

showed him the arsenal of hail that was 
prepared for the time of trouble, the day of 
battle and war. He spake of the attrac- 
tion that reached to the Pleiades — fifteen 
hundred millions of millions of miles from 
the earth — yet held them steady to their or- 
bits. He spake of Orion, and Arcturus, 
and Mazaroth — '*for he calleth them all by 
their names." He challenged the light- 
nings, and they knew his voice. He told 
him of the lion, and of the appetite of the 
young lions, which he daily filled ; that he 
heard the raven ''when his young ones cry 
unto God." He gave the period of mater- 
nity to the wild goats, and to the hinds 
when they bring forth their young. He 
sees the zebra in his pasture amid the range 
of the mountains, and the wild ass "who 
scorneth the cry of the driver." He points 
out to him, as to the first pair in Eden, the 
strength of the unicorn, the wings of the 
peacock, the eggs of the ostrich; the quiv- 
ering terror of the horse, when he hears the 



86 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

shouting of the battle ; the nest of the eagle 
in the crags of the highest pinnacle of 
rock; that all are under his eye and answer 
to his presence. Here, too, is behemoth 
** which I made with thee"; he is chief 
of the ways of God: his bones are as bars 
of iron; **He that made him can make his 
sword to approach unto him" ; ** See ! levi- 
athan — canst thou draw him out with a 
hook; wilt thou play with him as with a 
bird ; or wilt thou bind him for thy maid- 
ens? Canst thou fill his skin with barb- 
ed irons, or his head with fish -spears?" 
"Upon earth there is not his like who is 
made without fear." 

And so God instructs Job in the one 
great thought that all nature has been made, 
and is supported, by a Person; the same 
lesson that the Son of God displayed when 
on earth, that he himself was at every point 
of the universe, visible and invisible. This 
minute review of nature, that illustrates the 
personal presence of God everywhere, is 



Johy a Prince of the Mast, 87 

not the least of the purposes of this book. 
It constitutes an all-sufficient refutation of 
Materialism, Pantheism, Positivism, Brah- 
manism, Buddhism, Naturalism, Fatalism, 
Deism, and every other form of metaphys- 
ical skepticism. For it is here that infidel- 
ity in manifold ways takes its stand; that 
though the world might be created by God, 
it goes forward without him, as a perfected 
piece of machinery, and he is personally no 
longer present. And it is here that the 
Son of God met infidelity, while on earth. 
He challenged nature at every point, and 
nature responded. 

Its Authorship. 

No book carries a stronger internal evi- 
dence of divine origin than does this ar- 
chaic poem. Only the Spirit of God could 
furnish truths which lie so far away from 
human conjecture, holding such heights 
and depths, such recesses and all devour- 
ing abysses of creational thought, such 



88 Studies of Bible Truths, 

mightiness of words and resonance, as these 
syllables of the Almighty. It may be attrib- 
uted to Moses or Solomon or some Baby- 
lonian, but only Job could write the Book 
of Job. One must have breathed the ear- 
liest atmosphere of revelation, and have 
known God as he knew him, to have had 
the power, purity, and sublimity of these 
periods, and to have used words never 
used elsewhere. Solomon in his luxurious 
surroundings could not portray the agonies, 
the constancy, and the moral perfectness of 
the patriarch, nor scarcely have been used 
by the Spirit in such a role. Even his rich- 
est conceptions of wisdom and creation but 
echo the majesty of those syllables of Job 
that still thunder in the mount. But be- 
sides this, there is evidence that neither 
Solomon nor Moses were employed by the 
Spirit in this earliest composition. In it 
the name of God in the singular, JSloah, 
occurs in forty-two places ; though this use 
of the name of the Almighty occurs only 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 80 

fifty-two times in the whole Bible, and but 
twice in the writings of Moses. ^ The name 
of God was regarded with special rever- 
ence by all Israelites; had Moses written 
Job, we should have evidence of it in the 
Pentateuch, in an habitual use of the divine 
name in the singular. 

That Job should have attained to a de- 
gree of holiness and of fellowship with 
God, at this early hour, which St. Paul, 
at the latest moment of Christian experi- 
ence, desired to realize, by apprehending his 
Lord as he was apprehended of him, re- 
veals the perfect communion which even 
then existed between God and his Church. 
The *' patience" of this noble sufferer was 
not in mere endurance, but in the unbend- 
ing consciousness of a pure life, and an un- 
wavering faith. He could not be induced 
to complain against his Lord, by all the an- 
guish of his frame and the perplexity of his 

^The plural Elohim occurs more than three thou- 
sand times in the Bible. 



90 Studies of Bible Truths, 

reverses. He exhausted the attacks of Sa- 
tan by the nobility of his faith in God. 

A man admirable to men for his moral 
and spiritual worth is equally admirable to 
the Father of men and angels. The hand 
of God was again opened, and wealth re- 
turned to the patriarch. The Lord blessed 
the latter end of Job more than his begin- 
ning. He had twice as much at the latter 
end. His conduct, his character, and his 
utterances were vindicated by the Lord, in 
the presence of his *' friends": *'Ye have 
not spoken of me the thing that is right, as 
my servant Job hath. . . . Go to my serv- 
ant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt 
offering ; and my servant Job shall pray for 
you: for him will I accept: lest I deal with 
you after your folly, in that ye have not 
spoken of me the thing that is right, like 
my servant Job." They did as the Lord 
commanded, and so were accepted of him. 
After this, Job lived a hundred and forty 
years. 



Job, a Prince of the East, 91 

Satan. 
This first inspired book reveals the source 
of evil. It tells of its great extent over ev- 
ery age, every country, and of the audacity 
of the enemy even on the plane of assem- 
bled angels. He vaunts his doubt, his con- 
tempt of the manhood of Job — as, after- 
wards, he doubted the Son 01 man. This 
width of evil is a clear revelation of that 
war that is upon us, to which there is no 
truce; which is waged on every hill and in 
every vale of earth ; from which there is no 
discharge; in which there can be no neu- 
trality; which affects the fortunes of every 
man, as well as those of all men. The pas- 
sages of Scripture in which Satan occurs 
are remarkable for the absence of all ex- 
cess of statement. They are strictly narra- 
tive in structure, and carry with them an 
atmosphere of transparent truth. The rec- 
ord of Satan in the garden of Eden, of his 
presence at two distinct assemblies of an- 
gelic principalities in heaven, and that of 



92 Studies of Bible Truths, 

the temptation in the wilderness and on the 
exceeding high mount, are entirely devoid 
of color. Even amid displays of thauma- 
turgic power on the mount, and on the pin- 
nacle of the temple, his language might 
have been that of the Sanhedrin seeking to 
know the true force of Scripture. In all 
these he is the selfsame potent and all-suf- 
ficient person. But by Christ his pride was 
detected, and he was remanded to his own 
place. And by the patriarch he is defeated 
in the presence of thrones, dominions, and 
principalities. Beyond this, the mazy sub- 
tleties of his approach to the human spirit 
are discovered to us in the experience of 
Job's friends. They explain the conflict of 
God's people with '' spiritual wickedness in 
high places," of which St. Paul warns the 
Church. This culminates in the last speak- 
er, who suddenly appears against Job. So 
sinuous is his attack, and yet so elevated 
his style, so false and severe, yet so lofty in 
reverence and statement, that to this day 



Job, a Prince of the East, 93 

some commentators accord to Elihu a place 
equal to the patriarch in revelation of truth. 
But the Almighty is emphatic. ** Who is 
this that darkeneth counsel by words with- 
out knowledge?'' gives the true animus of 
the self-contained Elihu. And by his ex- 
clusion from the benefits of sacrifice, his 
sin is also emphasized as outside of ordi- 
nary mercy. He was saturated with the 
mind of Satan. Gregory the Great, who 
became pope 590 A.D., nearly a thousand 
years before Luther, makes this estimate of 
Elihu in a treatise on Job of singular abili- 
ty. Elihu' s extended and pressing invita- 
tion to Job to repent; that God was ready 
to forgive those who confessed sin; to con- 
sider him as a representative of the Most 
High; in truth, a *' daysman " such as might 
mediate between man and God, must have 
fallen upon the ear of Heaven as the bold 
challenge of one playing Satan's game 
without knowing it. When we remember 
that the universe, above and beneath, was 



94 Studies of Bible Truths, 

watching the issue of this battle of patriarch 
and foe, an act such as Elihu suggested 
would have given Satan a victory only less 
than that which he contemplated when he 
asked the Son of God to worship him. 

Elihu. 

Three of Job's friends assail him on the 
basis of supposed hypocrisy and unsound- 
ness of morals. But Elihu attacks his faith ; 
charges him with want of humility and of a 
just fear of God; of spiritual unsoundness 
and self-deception. He boldly accuses the 
sufferer. He takes high ground. He dis- 
courses upon nature and spirit; upon angels 
and mediation. He multiplies words. He 
says much that is calculated to impress one 
that he is at home in the field of knowl- 
edge, of inspiration, and of providence. 
He has no patience with the words of Job, 
the very speech which afterwards God pro- 
nounces to be *' right." One might think 
that he was all unconscious of any sinister 



Job^ a Prince of the East, 95 

spirit controlling his attack upon the pa- 
triarch; but so was it with the other royal 
comforters. Yet, as we know, Satan was 
using them in this conflict between light and 
darkness; using minds as well as winds; 
poisoning men's thoughts; warping, de- 
nouncing, accusing, and cursing, down to 
the mouth of hell; killing, burning; turn- 
ing light into shade, and shadow into death ; 
darkening sky and earth with the blackness 
of despair; and holding up a man to the 
gaze of myriads of fallen angels and the 
contempt of earth. For all these resources 
for the time were at his command. But 
out of this crucible of Satanic hate Job 
came forth, as gold from the test of an as- 
sayer, perfect in the eyes of Heaven and in 
the estimate of the ages. 

Such a one as Elihu conceived Job to be 
would not have been esteemed of God, and 
announced as before to heaven's hosts as 
a perfect man, and before all men in the 
earth, and standing alone in his perfection. 



96 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

Nor would he have been chosen by the 
Lord as the champion of humanity in its 
conflict with Satan ; nor, unless the victory 
over the foe had been complete to the end, 
would the Lord have signalized it by giving 
to the victor twice as much substance and 
happiness as he had before. Had the lips 
of Job sinned, God would not have com- 
mended his speech as an ensample of the 
truth; nor if he so commended his words 
would he have addressed to him the start- 
ling sentence, **Who is this that darkeneth 
counsel by words without knowledge?" 
If the Lord found fault with the three 
friends for their difference with the patri- 
arch, his servant, he could not commend 
the still greater divergence of Elihu. If in 
this first sentence the Almighty did not ad- 
dress Job, he must have meant the ''multi- 
plied" obscure words of Elihu. When 
*'the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the 
kindred of Ram,^' assumed to represent 
God and to be bursting with the truth, 



Job, a Prince of the JEast, 97 

which he had received as new wine from 
heaven — when in fact he was far from the 
true view of both God and providence — we 
can see why he was exempted from the 
sacrifice that Job was appointed to offer. 
He stood Hke Peter, who attempted to chide 
the Master, saying, **Not so, Lord; this be 
far from thee"; when the Saviour turned 
so sternly upon him and said, *'Get thee 
behind me, Satan: for thou savorest not 
the things that be of God, but the things 
that be of men." 

Providence. 

The presence of God in all the provi- 
dences of human life, as well as at all points 
of human trial, is fully expressed in the cup 
which this holy man drained. He sees 
every form of disaster, in the panorama of 
his own experience. His faith moves with 
the clouds that move above him, and often- 
times light appears through the rift of the 
sky. His intellect bursts forth upon a dark- 



98 Studies of Bible Truths. 

ened landscape, as the sun during a storm, 
until we forget that it is a time of battle and 
of war. To know that he sends the rain 
on the forest to water its bloom, '* where 
no man is,'' is to know that God is present 
with every man, at every homestead, to sat- 
isfy even the wants of the children, and 
bless them with ** the dew of his youth." 

Next to his Lord, in Gethsemane, no 
man could more justly say, *'Why hast 
thou forsaken me ? ' ' For at times it seemed 
as if he had been forgotten of God: *' God 
hath delivered me to the ungodly"; *'all 
my inward friends abhorred me ; and they 
whom I loved are turned against me." 
Yet out of all this there comes forth this 
sublime sunburst: *'I know that my Re- 
deemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the 
latter day upon the earth ; and though after 
my skin worms destroy this body, yet in 
my flesh shall I see God ; whom I shall see 
for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and 
not another." 



Job, a Prince of the East. 99 

Faith in the atonement, and in the power 
of the resurrection, was the support of the 
patriarch. That faith which penetrates all 
space and the ages, '* the evidence of things 
not seen, and the substance of things hoped 
for," places Job well to the front of that 
heroic company described by St. Paul in 
his letter to the Hebrews, without whom 
the Church would not be made perfect. 

The fierce extreme from being the great- 
est prince of the East to the loathsome person 
of an eastern leper, sitting without the city 
gate, on a dung-heap, is a type of His for- 
tune, who from the infinite glory of the God- 
head descended to the estate of a servant, 
and thence to the death of the cross, *' with- 
out the gate, that he might sanctify the peo- 
ple with his own blood." And then the 
sudden transition from this depth to great 
afiluence foreshadows the exaltation of the 
Saviour — ** Wherefore God hath highly ex- 
alted him." 

Between these extremes every phase of 

LofC. 



lOO Studies of Bihle Truths, 

human condition lies under the eye of God. 

So that the solution of the most insoluble 

mystery of suffering is in this ; God is near ; 

he knows the way that I take ; he limits the 

trial; his grace is, and ever will be, adequate 

to meet it: *' He loved me and gave himself 

for me." 

Sovereignty. 

It will be seen that Elihu's argument is, 
in the main, a plea for the sovereignty of 
God: *' God is greater than man; why dost 
thou strive against him? for he giveth not 
account of any of his matters.'' This is a 
very summary way of disposing of all the 
providences of human history. But in this 
book God does give an account of his deal- 
ing with man; that he is solicitous for the 
happiness of all his creatures ; that he lives 
in the holiness and reverence of his people ; 
that while a Creator he is also a Governor 
and a Father; that he rejoices in the habit- 
able parts of the earth, and his delights are 
with the sons of men. The whole book is 



Joh^ a Prince of the East, loi 

a refutation of any theory of the inscruta- 
bility of God's purposes to the heart of 
man. On the contrary, he invites his serv- 
ant Job to **gird up his loins like a man: 
for I will demand of thee, and answer thou 
me." Then he points out the mightiness 
and tenderness displayed throughout na- 
ture. The darkness that shrouded the pa- 
triarch during his overthrow is now changed 
to a blinding splendor of the Divine Pres- 
ence which his eye is strengthened to bear. 
* ' Now mine eyes see thee . ' ' He is taken into 
the inner chamber of the Most High; and 
while nature passes by in solemn proces- 
sion, it is interpreted to the eye, the ear, and 
the heart of him whom the King delights 
to honor. 

Suffering. 

The consent of commentators as to the 
object of this great epic is its solution of 
the mystery of human suffering. Though 
this is not its main object, yet it does enter 
into the plan of the Spirit. In the periods 



102 Stttdies of Bible Truths. 

of Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, so sublime 
and weighty, they attempt to show that by 
the providence of God the truly good are 
rewarded in this world, and the wicked are 
made to suffer. This ordinary theory is 
confuted by Job in discourses of equal 
beauty and surpassing grandeur. In other 
words, the providence of God was held by 
the three royal persons to be punitive and 
recompensive. The theory of the fourth 
speaker, Elihu, was that providence is in- 
scrutable, in so far as we can hope for any 
explanation by the Infinite One, who does 
all things after the counsel of his own will : 
that a man may not contend for or assert 
his own justification before God ; nor ques- 
tion the right of the Creator to fashion his 
creatures according to his own will; that 
the Most High is, without explanation, a 
sufficient guarantee for the righteousness of 
his government. These theories fall far 
short of explaining the mystery of suffer- 
ing, as interpreted by the history of Job. 



Job^ a Prince of the JEast, 103 

Here it is presented as a school of divine fel- 
lowship. The patriarch never for a moment 
assented to the theory of his friends, that 
providence was either punitive or disciplin- 
ary. He knew that his heart was right 
with God, that he was firmly true, and that 
the purpose of a loving Father, though hid- 
den for the while, would surely vindicate 
the divine justice and his own integrity. 
When we see this amazing faith, that like 
a search-light takes in the '* sufferings of 
Christ, and the glory that should follow"; 
and the w^hole system of salvation down to 
the present hour, which Job sees between 
the ample spaces of his own agony, we can 
understand somewhat of the uses of suffer- 
ing in the revealing purposes of God. If 
there was no way that the cup might pass 
from the Saviour, in revealing his infinite 
love, may it not be equally true that this 
love can only be measured through the 
same kind of experience? 

Christ says, "Behold, I make all things 



I04 Studies of Bible Truths. 

new"; and his coming and going have 
given a new meaning to human suffering. 
"He was made a little lower than the an- 
gels for the suffering of death " ; ** Though 
he were a Son, yet learned he obedience 
by the things which he suffered; and be- 
ing made perfect, he became the author of 
eternal salvation to all them that obey him." 
We see that he has established a basis of 
community in suffering: *'If we suffer, we 
shall also reign with him " ; * * If we be 
dead with him, we shall also live with him." 
A community of experience in suffering 
with him is the ground and basis of a com- 
munity of honor and glory with him. So 
that the end of suffering is that it offers 
us a community of experience with Christ. 
Inasmuch as Christ's death is the one 
event that fills the universe with its fame, 
and is the sufficient expression of infinite 
love, we should not wonder that all things 
point to it, in the providential arrangement 
of human fortune, nor that every display of 



Job, a Prince of the East. 105 

the divine power should, both directly and 
indirectly, lead that way. The criminal 
who is about to be executed must find some 
elevation in the thought that Christ, though 
the Lord of glory, suffered with thieves at 
the hands of the law. 

Suffering arrests the thoughtless, and of- 
ten by its sobering influence turns the heart 
to the Man of sorrows. Bereavement, sud- 
den bankruptcy, or imminent danger, urges 
the mind on the pathway of wisdom. Even 
the anguish that doubts will often lead the 
heart to explore the cause of its own suffer- 
ing, and that may speedily bring it to the 
greatest of all Sufferers. Upon no other 
ground can humanity meet the Son of God 
so surely as upon this one of his sufferings. 
Here every one is offered the priceless 
opportunity of a community of experience 
with him — '*the fellowship of his suffer- 
ings"; and, when guided by the Spirit, oh 
what a joy it is to know that they were en- 
dured for every man ! 



io6 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

The effect of the sufferings of Christ 
upon humanity is well illustrated by the 
speech of the Rev. W. C. Bailey at the 
Missionary Conference at London, in i8S8. 
He had been laboring among the five hun- 
dred thousand lepers of India for twelve 
years; '*the most helpless and hopeless 
sufferers on the face of the earth, who, if 
here to-day, would say, ' Have pity upon 
me, have pity upon me, O my friends, for 
the hand of the Lord hath touched me/" 

As a class I do not know of anj in India so access- 
ible to the gospel. I have met with lepers as bright 
Christians as I have met with in this or in any other 
country. Let me give you the testimony of one man. 
I stood beside a poor mutilated form, a man literally 
falling to pieces before my eyes; and that poor man, 
in a hoarse, broken whisper, said to me when I com- 
miserated him upon his terrible suffering: "No, sir; 
no, sir; God is very good to me. For the last nine- 
teen years, since I have trusted Christ, I have known 
neither pain of body nor pain of mind." So wonder- 
fully had Christ lifted him above all his sufferings 
that he was able to say that. I was so struck by it 
that I turned to my friend, a missionary on my right, 



Job^ a Prince of the Kast, 107 

and I asked him whether I had heard the man aright. 
I was so astounded, I asked him again; and again the 
old man said to me: "No sir; since I trusted Christ, 
nineteen years ago, I have known neither pain of 
body nor pain of mind." A leper without Christ is 
one in whom the candle of hope is forever extin- 
guished. 

Such testimony could be multiplied from 
the missions of the world ; from those above 
Hudson's Bay to those of the Hebrides, 
Formosa, the Fijis, and others of the South 
Sea Islands — all presenting the same pow- 
erful evidence of the Spirit's assuagement 
of human misery by the faith of the cross. 

Immortality. 
At the very threshold of its opening, this 
divine poem introduces us to the world of 
spirits, the morning stars, and the sons of 
God. They present themselves before the 
Lord. This atmosphere of an invisible 
world pervades the entire book ; we feel at 
every act of the drama that unearthly dram- 
atis personcB are present, going in and out, 
along with those whom we recognize as hu- 



lo8 Studies of Bible Truths, 

man. This spiritual presence pervades all 
Scripture narrative, but not to the same in- 
tensity. 

The resurrection of Christ and his ascen- 
sion are the greatest of all evidences to the 
immortality of man; but the existence of 
angels opens to the heart a universe of sub- 
limity and life which words cannot portray. 
We shall be no longer alone upon entering 
that region of perpetual youth, but have 
been preceded there by myriads. Nor is 
it bare life, but majesty, in ascending ter- 
race, height above height, of principality 
and dominion. These we see in their 
mighty assembly listening to the Most High 
as he presents to their notice the man of the 
Chaldees as one sharing the infinite love, 
and resisting, in unison with them, the 
prince of evil. Those angelic throngs to 
whom we are introduced at the close of the 
Canon are these who appear in the opening 
chapter of this book. Surely here we see 
a life toward which we continually aspire. 



Joh^ a Prince of the East. 109 

Its Spirituality. 
The twenty-ninth and thirtieth chapters 
of Job will compare with the Sermon on 
the Mount for height and intensity of spir- 
itual analysis. They anticipate the Sav- 
iour's rendering of law by fully twenty- 
three hundred years. St. Paul has noth- 
ing in that exquisite statement of the law 
of love, in Corinthians, that surpasses the 
** charity" of the patriarch: **If my heart 
walked after mine eyes; if I rejoiced be- 
cause my wealth was great ; if I rejoiced at 
the destruction of him that hated me; if I 
have eaten my morsel alone, and the fa- 
therless have not eaten thereof; if I have 
walked with vanity; or if my foot hath 
hasted to deceit, let me be weighed in an 
even balance, that God may know my in- 
tegrity." None of those to whom the book 
has been attributed, from Abraham down 
through the greatest of his descendants — 
until the Messiah — could have uttered these 
words; certainly neither Moses nor Solo- 



no Studies of Bible Truths, 

mon nor David could have depicted this 
beauty of holiness as their personal experi- 
ence. Only the man the like of whom there 
was not at that day in the whole earth, the 
blessed Job, could have written this *' Book 
of the Wars of the Lord.'* Those super- 
natural afflictions were essential to the mar- 
velous alchemy which left to all who might 
come after the golden measures which 
change earth's fniserere into the sympho- 
nies of heaven. 

Its Place in the Canon. 
Was this book intended to be a revela- 
tion complete in itself, or as a part of the 
history of redemption, depending upon the 
whole system for its full understanding? 
Is it to be held, in common with all the 
books of the Old and the New Testament, 
as the work of One Mind on one great 
scheme — a Titanic conflict, in which the 
spirit of Christ wages an unrelenting war 
with the power of evil, from Genesis to 
Revelation ? 



Job , a Prince of the East, 1 1 1 

Apart from its apprehension of the tran- 
scendent movements of the Son of God in 
the interests of humanity, the book would 
be limited to the age of its writing; but it 
lifts the veil of ages to come, and reveals 
the glory of a Messiah as the Redeemer of 
the race. If we try to think of the Sacred 
Canon without the Book of Job, we shall 
realize the value of its syllables. Far sep- 
arated, by time and space, from the family 
to whom was committed the wealth of in- 
spiration, this sublime scripture attests the 
essential harmony of the One Author — the 
Holy Spirit. Its holy periods can be placed 
beside those of the Son of God on Mount 
Olivet, or his high-priestly prayer in the 
** upper chamber." As a pillar of light it 
throws its beams far in advance over the 
Church of the New Testament. It unites 
in one the Two Covenants by an arc of 
prophetic splendor. 



112 Studies of Bible Truths. 

When Written. 
Mr. Watson supposes that Job was writ- 
ten at the age of Peleg, long before Abra- 
ham, or even at a period nearer the flood. 
The fact that Job lived one hundred and 
forty years after his restoration to health 
and prosperity indicates a long life. It was 
after the tower of Babel, and before Sod- 
om ; a stretch of time in which the lesson 
of the deluge had lost much of its restrain- 
ing effect upon the world; while, on the 
other hand, sin kept pace with the rapid in- 
crease of mankind. It looked as if earth 
might be again ruined by the craft of Satan: 
was man, at his best, capable of meeting 
this adversary? Could man cope with him 
intellectually? Had the race been so far 
elevated by the promise of a Divine Son- 
ship that it could withstand the subtlety, 
power, and terror of this malignant foe? 
From what region was deliverance to come ? 



Job, a Prince of the East, 113 

Where Written. 
Mr. Watson places Job in the country to 
which, long after, Jacob made his journey 
to the ''people of the East," where his 
mother's family lived; the region of Chal- 
dea, not far from the plain of Shinar, near 
the Euphrates and on the border of the 
Arabian Desert: a region admirable for 
commercial purposes. The bottom lands 
of the river could support large herds of 
camels, of oxen, and flocks of sheep, "be- 
sides his very great household"; while the 
desert gave ample employment for six thou- 
sand camels, in transporting merchandise 
from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean 
Sea. These "ships of the desert" could 
carry an ordinary cargo across the sandy 
waste of hundreds of miles in two weeks. 
Chaldea was in the line of travel from all 
the eastern countries to all the western. 
Besides which, at an early day here had 
concentrated the intelligence as well as the 

wealth of the world. The Chaldeans were 
8 



114 Studies of Bible Truths. 

proverbially wise in all science and arts. 
So, too, it was the land whence Abram had 
been moved when God determined to raise 
up an ancestry for the promised Messiah. 
It is evident that the region where the pa- 
triarch lived was one of high civilization; 
and one in which the Holy Spirit had dif- 
fused a knowledge of the Most High God, 
and had brought his worship to its highest 
perfection. The promise of a Deliverer 
had been so identified with the birth of a 
firstborn Son that every generation and ev- 
ery family lived in immediate and constant 
expectation of his coming. Thus to a large 
measure they reaped in advance the bless- 
ing of a Saviour, as we now do from the 
memory of one. The language of Job dur- 
ing his fearful suffering tells of a fellow- 
ship with his Lord, and of a holiness not 
surpassed by that of St. John. 

That at last a man had matured, who 
in the sight of God was an exponent of 
Heaven's ideal of manhood, was a fact of 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 115 

sufficient moment to give birth to this in- 
spired epic. The period of Job presented 
no special advantage for solving the ** mys- 
tery of human suffering." Every preced- 
ing age, from the expulsion of man from 
Eden until the then present, offered full as 
good opportunity. Something more was 
needed than power of endurance under 
heavy affliction, or a vindication of the di- 
vine justice. It was the illustration of the 
power of a new life from a new source. 
Was the spirit of Christ in man a match for 
Satan? All the qualities of the new man 
were at the disposal of the Holy Spirit, and 
with them he panoplied the prince of the 
East for his dire conflict. 

The high spirit of Job at all times during 
the trial has puzzled the commentators, who 
adopt the ** patience" of Job as the one 
thing in which he was perfect. He makes 
no admission, no confession, but maintains 
the bold front of conscious innocence. He 
makes no virtue of his grief. He sees no 



1 16 Studies of Bible Truths* 

merit in the decay of his flesh; even his 
death could not be held as worthy beyond 
the fact that it ends pain. But he does see 
that his Redeemer can make death itself a 
passage to immortal life, and he desires that 
faith in this Redeemer shall be written for 
the ages with the point of a diamond upon 
a tablet of adamant. 

The Family. 

The Book of Job begins and ends with a 
family. This family life of the patriarch is 
held up for the instruction of angels and 
men. Greater importance could scarcely 
be conceived than is hereby given to it. 
It is under the watchful eye of the Almighty, 
through all its passage in the deep waters, 
and emerges in greater strength at the last 
of its history. The children are described 
in their favor as beautiful to the eye of God. 
The battle had involved all that made life 
dear to the patriarch. His sons and daugh- 
ters, the subjects of his daily sacrifice, were 



Job^ a Prince of the East. 117 

swept away at a stroke. Every branch had 
been torn off, and he stood naked as a dead 
tree in an old field. But by and by health, 
children, and substance return, and his 
fireside is surrounded with all that consti- 
tutes the home a resting place for the son 
of peace. He who has incorporated the 
family into his own name, *'the God of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," was preemi- 
nently the God of Job. The Almighty cre- 
ated man in the relationship of husband and 
wife, parents and children, brothers and 
sisters, with their mutual dependence and 
protection, as the crowning glory of his 
handiwork, the beauty of his holiness. It 
was the one end of all creative wisdom. 

Plains where the fate of nations have 
been decided have become as famous as 
the armies that met in conflict upon them — 
as Esdraelon, Marathon, Philippi, Leipzig, 
Waterloo. The battle between Satan and 
mankind was first of all upon the field of 
humanity in Eden; the next was upon the 



ii8 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

field of a new manhood; the third included 
all the conditions of renewed spiritual life, 
as realized in the family of Job. All that 
man is since the coming of the Son of God 
he was potentially two thousand years be- 
fore his coming. It was a question what 
those potentialities were. The Almighty 
declared in the presence of assembled hosts 
that they had been displayed fully in the 
character of Job. It was this man whose 
qualities Satan was permitted to subject to 
the last analysis. 

We know what the end was. But it is 
important to know that this prince of the 
East carried into the contest all that he had 
and all that he was: his royal priesthood, 
his godly household, a superior talent for 
worldly affairs, a cultivated intellect, his 
scientific attainments, his breadth and lift 
of genius in the inspired speech of truth, 
and a life of faultless humanity, piety, and 
courtesy. On the other side, Satan had an 
open field of attack. His opponent, as a 



Job, a Pi'ince of the East. 119 

crown diamond, presented many facets of 
inviting beauty; but he chose to move 
against the family life of Job. On this 
field of purity and power he was defeated ; 
in which there was a poetic justice, for it 
was the family of Eden, at the first of fam- 
ily life, he had assailed, and through its 
sacred ties he had prevailed. The angels 
that inquired so earnestly of the sufferings 
of Christ, and the glory that should follow, 
must have looked upon the trial of Job and 
his household with bated breath, knowing 
by awful experience the subtlety of the 
dragon. They who saw the battle on the 
sapphire pavement of heaven now saw it, 
as it waged from the palace of wealth to the 
dunghill of a leper: where, long after, it was 
won again, without the gate, in the place of 
a skull, and in the house of the dead. 
Its Intellectual Eminence. 
The epics of a Milton, a Virgil, or a 
Dante are reckoned among the highest 
products of the human mind. All that man 



120 Studies of Bible Truths. 

has uttered in the past is placed at the 
command of genius, with all that time is 
continually revealing from the womb of the 
morning. Since the days of Job many 
ages have passed, intellectually; and yet 
with no book preceding, and myriads suc- 
ceeding, what one composition equals it in 
the majesty of its periods, in the firmness 
and delicacy of its outlines, in the boldness 
of its flights, in the thunder of its machin- 
ery'-, in the ghostly terror of its atmosphere, 
in the sustained resonant speech of the 
divine lip, in the depths of its fathomless 
agonies, in the anthems of its seraphic 
choirs ? 

Outside of the Holy Word, there are no 
writers to be mentioned with this inspired 
epic. Only can it be compared with those 
whose lips have been touched with the live 
coal from off the altar — Moses, David, and 
Solomon; Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel. 

In estimating the genius of the author, 
the question of inspiration naturally arises: 



Job, a Prince of the East, I2i 

How much is to be credited to Job, and 
how much to the Spirit? "Holy men 
spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost." Though the whole man may be 
under the control of the Spirit, we may yet 
ask at what point is the work inspired; at 
the thought, or at the sentiment, or at the 
imagination of the writer? The words of 
the Scriptures are tried words; they are 
*'as silver refined seven times"; they are 
vital, *' spirit and life " ; the word, the very 
word, alone can give the mind of the Spir- 
it. Surely One who created speech before 
the creation of light, saying, *'Let there be 
light," and who has created the two thou- 
sand languages now spoken, could watch 
words and particles to the nicest shade of 
expression, and could break the mold after 
having stereotyped the casting. The He- 
brew and the Greek have secured to all 
generations the exact mind of the Spirit, in 
words fit to be repeated in the anthems of 
glory. Words upon which life and death 



122 Studies of Bible Truths, 

and the will of God are suspended are 
worthy of being written by his finger upon 
tablets of hewn stone, and kept in the gold- 
en ark of the cherubim. We must needs 
know, not what is about the meaning, but 
the exact wording, of the laws of God ; for 
such are precious enough to be sprinkled 
with the blood of the everlasting covenant. 



Joh^ a Prince of the East, 123 

POPE GREGORY ON JOB. 

An extract Jrom "Aforals of the Book of Job " by Pope Gregory the 

Great : his iratislation of Elihu's speeches atid his 

estimate of Elihu^s character. 

One of the most admirable estimates of 
Job is that by Pope Gregory the Great. 
He preceded the Reformation by a thou- 
sand years. He was elected Primate of the 
Roman Church A.D. 590. His treatise on 
the ** blessed Job ' ' was one of singular abili- 
ty. We give his translation of the speeches 
of Elihu, his comments, and his estimate of 
Elihu's character. This he introduces by 
the remark that ** Satan exercised with 
great skill the permission he had received 
to test Job. For he burned his herds, de- 
stroyed his family, overwhelmed his heirs, 
and in order to launch against him a weap- 
on of severer temptation, he kept in store 
the tongue of his wife." 

The ancient enemy therefore, because he was 
grieved at being foiled by him in his domestic trials, 
proceeded to seek for help from abroad. He sum- 



124 Studies of Bible Truths, 

moned therefore his friends, each from his own place, 
as if for the purpose of displaying their affection. By 
this very means he launched against him shafts of 
reproach under the cover of a friendship which was 
professed but not observed. After these Elihu, also a 
younger person, is urged on even to use insult. . . . 
But against these many machinations of the ancient 
enemy his constancy stood unconquered, his equa- 
nimity unbroken. In all these things Job sinned not 
ivitk his lips. 

Chap, xxxii. i. "These three men ceased to answer 
Job because he was just in his own eyes." 

In the expression "because he seemed just in his 
own eyes," the author of this sacred history intended 
to refer to the opinion of Job's friends. 

Ver. 2. "And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buz- 
ite, of the kindred of Ram, was wroth and indig- 
nant." 

He convicts Job of presuming on his righteousness, 
his friends of making a foolish answer. 

Vers. 4, 5. " Elihu therefore waited while Job was 
speaking, because they who were speaking were his 
elders. But when he had seen that the three were not 
able to answer, he was very wroth." 

Vers. 6, 7. "And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buz- 
ite answered and said, I am younger in age, but ye are 
more ancient. I therefore held down my head, and 
feared to show you my opinion. For I was hoping 



Job^ a Prince of the East, 125 

that greater age would speak, and that a multitude of 
jears would teach wisdom." 

All these words which are uttered by him through 
swelling pride must be rather glanced at by the way 
than expounded more attentively. Elihu was more 
wise as long as he remained silent; but in despising 
a multitude of years he showed plainly his childish 
folly. 

Ver. 8. " But, as I see, there is a spirit in man, and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth understand- 
ing." 

He would be right in saying this, did he not 
arrogate to himself this same wisdom above all 
others. 

Vers. 9-1 1. " Old men are not wise, neither do the 
ancients understand judgment. Therefore I will say, 
Hearken unto me, I will show you my wisdom. For 
I waited for your words, I heard your wisdom, while 
ye were disputing in words : and as long as I thought 
ye said something, I considered." 

He remained silent, while the aged were speaking, 
rather with the desire of judging than with the wish of 
learning from them. 

Ver. 17. " I will also answer my part, and I will dis- 
play my knowledge." 

All proud men are anxious not to possess knowl- 
edge, but to make a display of it. 

Chap, xxxiii. i. " Wherefore Job hear my speeches, 



126 Studies of Bible Truths, 

and hearken to all my words. Behold I have opened 
my mouth : let my tongue speak in my throat." 

Let us consider from what a height of pride he 
comes down in admonishing Job to listen to him. . . . 
For the teaching of the boastful hath this peculiarity, 
that they cannot modestly suggest what they teach. 
. . . They fancy themselves to be seated on some 
lofty throne, and that they look upon their hearers as 
standing far beneath them. 

Vers. 6, 7. " Behold God made me as well as thee, 
and I am also formed of the same clay : yet let not my 
words terrify thee, and my eloquence be burdensome 
to thee." 

It is peculiar to the arrogant that they always bC' 
lieve, even before they speak, that they are going to 
say some wonderful thing, and that they anticipate 
their own words, by their own admiration, because 
Vvith all their acuteness they are not sensible how 
great a folly is their very pride. 

Ver. 8. "Thou hast spoken in my ears, and I have 
heard the voice of thy words, I am clean and without 
spot of sin, and there is no iniquity in me." 

And he immediately states his own opinion. 

Ver. 12. "This is the thing then in which thou art 
not justified." 

Blessed Job had indeed said that he had been 
scourged without any fault; for he said of himself 
exactly what the Lord said of him to the devil, Thou 



Joh, a Prince of the East. 127 

hast moved me against him to afflict him without 
cause. 

Vers. 31, 32. "Attend, O Job, and hearken unto me, 
and hold thj peace while I speak. But if thou hast 
anything to saj, answer me; speak: for I wish thee to 
appear just. But if thou hast not, hearken unto me; 
hold thy peace, and I will teach thee wisdom." 

He shows what opinion he has of himself. . . . For 
it is enormous pride to exact respect from one's elder, 
and to impose silence on one better than oneself. 

Chap, xxxiv. 2, 3. " Hear my words, O ye wise men, 
and listen to me, ye learned. For the ear trieth words, 
and the throat discerneth meats by the taste." 

Vers. 5, 6. " For Job hath said, I am just, and God 
hath subverted. For in judging me there is false- 
hood: and mine arrow is violent without any sin." 

He complains that Job had said these things, which 
the words of the sacred history prove on examination 
that he never said. 

Vers. 7, 8. " What man is like Job that drinketh up 
scorning like water?" 

How far this judgment of his upon blessed Job errs 
from the roadway of truth, we learn from the solemn 
declaration of God, " Hast thou considered my servant 
Job, that there is none like him on the earth?" 

Behold how Elihu declares him to be a sinner be- 
yond comparison, whom the Truth pronounces to be 
righteous beyond comparison. 



128 Studies of Bible Truths. 

Ver. 9. '* For he hath said that a man will not please 
God though he run with him." 

But that he never said so every one acknowledges 
who reads the words of blessed Job. 

Ver. 12. "For truly God will not condemn without 
cause, nor will the Almighty subvert judgment." 

The Lord said to the devil, "Thou hast moved me 
to afflict him without cause." But Elihu says that the 
Lord will not condemn without cause. 

Vers. 31, 32. " Because I have spoken to God I will 
not hinder thee also. If I have sinned, teach thou me; 
if I have spoken iniquity, I will add no more." 

Haughty men are apt to display this peculiarity in 
what they say, that, when they know they have said 
anything in a praiseworthy manner, then they in- 
quire o£ their hearers whether they have by chance 
said anything out of the way. . . . The object of their 
inquiry will be easily discovered, if when any one 
praises their good qualities he also blames their faults. 
For it is certain that as they are puffed up by praise so 
are they inflamed by reproofs. 

Vers. 34, 35. " Let men of understanding speak to 
me, and let a wise man hear me. But Job hath spo- 
ken foolishly, and his words sound not of disci- 
pline." 

Elihu would perhaps be speaking truly if the Au- 
thor of discipline had not agreed with what blessed 
Job had said of himself. 



Joh^ a Prince of the East, 129 

Ver. 36. "My Father! let Job be tried even to the 
end." 

In order that the malice of his cruelty may openly 
appear, he prays that he may still be tried by scourges. 
Ver. 37. " Who hath added blasphemy upon his 
sins." 

But the Lord judges far otherwise, who both as- 
serts that he was scourged without reason and con- 
feri'ed on him double goods after his scourgings. 

Chap. XXXV. 2. " Doth thy thought seem right to 
thee that thou sayest, I am more righteous than 
God.?" 

Blessed Job did not say that he was more righteous 
than God. 

Ver. 3. " For thou saidst. That which is right doth 
not please thee, or what will it profit thee if I shall 
have sinned ? " 

If the whole course of the book is attended to, 
blessed Job is proved to have said none of these 
things. 

Ver. 16. "Therefore doth Job open his mouth in 
vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge." 

Though he introduces his own opinions loquacious- 
ly, he accuses Job of the fault of loquacity. 

Chap, xxxvi. 17. "But thy cause has been judged 
as the cause of the ungodly, thou shalt receive thy 
cause and judgment. Let not anger overcome thee to 
oppress any one," 
9 



130 Studies of Bible Truths. 

These things are less suited to blessed Job the more 
deeply all things are known of him. 

Chap, xxxviii. 2. " Who is this that involves sen- 
tences in unskillful words?" 

As we have said also in a former part, an interroga- 
tive of this kind, in which it is said, ^^Who is thisf'' is 
the beginning of a reproof. For Elihu had spoken ar- 
rogantly. And we say not, " Who is this.'"' excepting 
expressly of him whom we know not. But knowledge 
on God's part is approval; his not knowing is rejec- 
tion. "I know you not whence ye are; depart from 
me, all ye workers of iniquity." 

Ver. 3. " Gird up thy loins as a man." 

Having glanced with contempt on "this man" 
. (Elihu), his words are directed to the instruction of 
Job. 

Vers. 4-6. " I will question thee, and answer thou 
me. Where wast thou when I was laying the founda- 
tions of the earth? Tell me if thou hast understand- 
ing. Who hath laid the measure of it, if thou know- 
est? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Where- 
upon are the bases thereof fastened?" 



III. 

The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ: 

The King of Glory — The Lord, Mighty in 
Battle. 

The revelation of Jesus Christ, given in 
the epic that concludes the Sacred Canon, 
is given from God, by the Holy Spirit, to 
his servant John; '* who bare record of the 
Word of God, and of the testimony of Je- 
sus Christ, and of all things that he saw." 
Its inspiration begins with the first line, and 
not in the title, which was placed there 
long after the age of the apostles. (^) That 
the Son of God became man, is the one 
truth upon which our universe rests. He is 
the '* elect" precious; the* 'beloved Son in 
whom I am well pleased"; **full of grace 
and truth"; **the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily." 

Yet the Incarnation was not expressed in 

(131) 



132 Studies of Bible Truths. 

all its mystery, in the bodily life of Christ 
while here upon earth. It has been trans- 
ferred from earth to heaven by his resur- 
rection and ascension. The Transfigura- 
tion was a statement in advance of its ulti- 
mate glory. In the holy mount humanity 
was invested for the while with the rays of 
Godhead. Upon Christ's ascension this 
Transfiguration is reproduced in heaven : a 
man in glory here, a man in glory there; 
the same man, the same glory. What more 
could be asked in proof of man's immortal- 
ity? 

That which was temporary here is per- 
manent there. Humanity abides forever in 
the rays of Godhead ! Christ's death took 
place between these two revelations. While 
these scenic statements of glory seem the 
one to be but a reflection of the other, they 
differ widely in their value. The scene on 
the holy mount was before the crucifixion, 
the scene in heaven after. On Hermon 
there were five men, who witnessed his 



The A;pocalypse of Jesus Christ. 133 

majesty: three apostles; the lawgiver, Mo- 
ses; and the prophet, Elijah. In heaven 
there were four and twenty elders, myriads 
of angels, seraphim, and cherubim. On 
earth he is witnessed to, "Hear him"; in 
heaven he is himself, the King, the Proph- 
et, and witnesses to the Holy Spirit, to 
whom the Church is committed for guid' 
ance henceforth. *'He that hath an ear, 
let him hear what the Spirit saith to the 

churches." 

The Key. 

The Transfiguration of Christ, on Har- 
mon, is the key to the Apocalypse. He 
was in prayer when the Spirit transfigured 
his person : the mountain and the disciples 
became luminous with the glory which he 
had with the Father before the world was. 
His limbs were solid light; his face bright 
as the midday sun ; his raiment white as the 
abyss of his holiness. It was the place and 
hour of his majesty. **Yet have I set my 
King upon my holy hill of Zion." 



134 Studies of Bible Truths, 

To grace his coronation Moses and Elijah 
came forth from the realm of the dead. 
'*They spake with him of his decease, 
which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. '* 
They leaned over the battlements of glory, 
and looked at the gates of hell he was about 
to storm. The *'two men" stood in the 
splendor of God's Anointed, as the chief 
persons of the Old Testament; and they 
saw the Son, the Eternal Priest, the one 
Lawgiver, the King of kings. Peter, 
James, and John saw them standing with 
Christ, and heard the theme of their con- 
verse. They felt the ravishing love of that 
high fellowship ; that it was the consumma- 
tion of all that heart could desire. As 
these great ones moved to depart, Peter 
begged that they might remain. Then 
came a voice from the excellent glory, 
*'This is my beloved Son; hear him!^^ 
These witnesses were the chief ones of the 
Church both of the Old and of the New 
Testament. Presently Jesus was found 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 135 

alone. This vision of Christ's majestic 
glory on Mount Hermon, and the vision of 
his enthroned majesty in heaven, as seen 
by St. John on Patmos, are identical, line 
for line, excepting the five scars in *'the 
body of his flesh, through death," received 
on Calvary. It pleased the Father, by the 
Son of his love, through these sacrificial 
scars, **to reconcile all things to himself; 
whether they be things in earth or things in 
heaven." 

It was an atmosphere of joy on Mount 
Hermon. There were no angels present, 
and the exclamation of Peter reveals the in- 
finite favor with which God honors men for 
the sake of his Son.(^) Within that halo 
all was security and confidence; outside of 
it were regions of fear and death. This 
revelation was in marked contrast with 
that of **the Lion of the tribe of Juda." 
There all is stormy; here all is peace. 
There all is judicial in aspect; here all is 
merciful. Here the Church alone consti- 



136 Studies of Bible Truths, 

tuted the company; there the whole vast 
sum of intelligent being was gathered; all 
before the flood and since; all of heaven, 
before the fall of angels, and since; and of 
hell, the home of Abaddon, all its hosts, 
now held in chains of darkness; all stand 
in this amphitheater of judicial award. 
Here the Church is within the palisades of 
redemption ; where mercy rejoiceth against 
judgment. There '*he shall have judg- 
ment without mercy, that hath shewed no 
mercy." 

There, upon his throne, the Son sits in 
his glorified humanity ; clad in vestments 
of light; girt with a golden girdle; his 
voice as the sound of the sea; his words 
two-edged and piercing. Upon sight of 
him John fell at his feet as dead. **He 
laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear 
not; I am the First and the Last. I am he 
that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I 
am alive for evermore, Amen ! and have 
the keys of hell and death." 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 137 

The first three chapters of the Apoca- 
lypse are specially devoted to the Church. 
The Son of man was never more like him- 
self than in his letters; in style, in faithful 
exhortation, in personal approach, in sus- 
tained kingly presence, in the v^ealth of en- 
couragement, and in the awards held out; 
a crown of life; the hidden manna; the 
jewel inscribed with the unutterable name ; 
the Morning star; the white raiment; a 
name written in the book of life; and a 
seat in his throne. 

**I have somewhat against thee because 
thou hast left thy first love." O blessed 
Saviour, dost thou so value our love, in 
that unseen universe of terror and power, 
where myriads bow at thy feet, and elders 
fall down and worship, casting their crowns 
upon the pavement of thy throne ; wilt thou 
accept from us a kiss of love ? 

The purpose of the Holy Spirit, in this 
Apocalypse, is to glorify Christ. So Christ 
exalts the Spirit, in his letters to the church- 



138 Studies of Bible Truths, 

es in Asia. Again and again he represents 
himself as the minister of the Holy Spirit, 
as he often did when in the world. The 
Spirit speaks not of himself, but through 
men; and in this Apocalypse he speaks 
through the Son of man, and through St. 
John. Christ indorses the Spirit as the au- 
thor of this revelation. It is the one final 
sublime word of the Author of the Holy 
Scriptures. It is in the interest of Him 
who, though mighty to save, is able both 
to save and to destroy. As the one alone 
worthy to accept the book of God's judi- 
cial righteousness, to him the Divine Maj- 
esty commits those judgments which have 
been held back, though long since record- 
ed in the sealed roll. It is a book of wars, 
the beginning of the end. He who was 
the Hope of Israel, who appeared as the 
Prince of Peace, now appears as the Con- 
queror and King whose dominion shall 
have no end, who must reign until he hath 
put all enemies under his footstool. (Ps. 



The Aj)ocalypse of Jesus Christ. 139 

ex.) *'From the commencement of his 
early sojourn every moment of his life has 
been illuminated by his kingly power and 
dignity; even in suffering he manifests his 
royal power in judging and ransoming the 
world. But he can only be fully revealed 
as King when he has completed his work 
as the Lord's righteous servant on earth." 
(Martensen.) 

The Divine Majesty. 

Now the scene changes : a door is opened 
in heaven. A throne is set. He that sat 
on it was the Almighty. A rainbow of 
emerald light was about him. In attend- 
ance were elders, in white vestments and 
golden crowns, seated upon four and twen- 
ty seats. Out of the throne proceeded 
lightnings, thunderings, voices. Directly 
before it were seven lamps of fire, and a 
sea of glass congealed as crystal, upon 
which stood the cherubim, each with six 
wings and full of eyes — pulsating day and 



140 Studies of Bible Truths. 

night, ** glory, honor, and thanks" to Him 
that sat on the throne, who "liveth forever 
and ever." When these cry, the elders 
fall down before him, and worship him, 
and cast their crowns before the throne, 
saying, '*Thou art worthy, O Lord, to re- 
ceive honor and glory and power, for thou 
hast created all things, and for thy pleasure 
they are and were created." 

He that sat on the throne held in his 
right hand a book. And an angel cried 
in a loud voice, **Who is worthy to open 
the book and to loose the seals thereof?" ^ 
The Son of man, the Lion of the tribe of 
Juda, stood before the throne, and took the 
book out of the right hand of him that sat 
upon the throne. Then elders and cher- 
ubim, with harps, and golden vials full of 

1 "And when I looked, behold, a hand was sent 
unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he 
spread it before me; and it was written within and 
without: and there was written therein lamentations, 
and mourning, and woe." (Ezek. ii. 9, 10.) 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 141 

odors, sang a new song, *' Thou art worthy, 
for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us 
to God, by thy blood, out of every kin- 
dred, and tongue, and people, and nation, 
and hast made us unto our God kings and 
priests." To this acclaim the universe re- 
sponded in one mighty throb of praise. 

The King of Glory. 

In the Transfiguration the Son was the 
one to whom the entire action was tribu- 
tary. So in the Apocalypse the One Per- 
son, **the Lord, mighty in battle," is the 
center of every unrolled vision. To him 
voices, trumpets, thunders, angels, cher- 
ubim, elders, harps, myriads upon myriads 
of hosts, give glory. It is by emphasis a 
revelation of Jesus Christ. From the first 
to the last note of its diapason, he is the 
soul of its harmony, the thunder of its an- 
thems. 

By the structure of this epic. He that 
breaks the seals orders every act of its 



142 Studies of Bible Truths, 

drama; for it is both epic and drama. 
**In an epic poem the first thing to be con- 
sidered is its action, which should have 
three qualifications: First, it should be but 
one action; secondly, it should be an en- 
tire action ; and thirdly, it should be a great 
action." (^Sfectator,Kd.d\^onS) There is 
also in the Apocalypse *'a real series of 
events that are invested with a dramatic 
unity and interest." (Webster.) The 
seventh seal contains the trumpets, the sev- 
enth trumpet contains the seven vials. By 
this ingenious arrangement it has but the 
one action of an epic poem. 

This mighty Person, who is the Prince of 
life, passed through the tragedy of Calvary 
and the realms of death, and for forty days 
mingled with his friends, ate and drank with 
them, explained the Scriptures to them, fed 
them on the seashore, challenged their per- 
sonal love, committed to them the fortunes 
of his kingdom, led them out in the open 
field of Olivet, and while talking of the 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 143 

Church began to rise slowly, as if gravita- 
tion had gently turned the other way ! And 
as they gazed and wondered, he ascended 
to the clouds, without wheel, or wing, or 
convoy, by his own omnipotence; and 
thence to the court of heaven. As the 
scene on Hermon was prophetic, so is the 
Apocalypse. Its tremendous issues have 
not yet wholly transpired, but are here de- 
picted for our study: that we may know 
the Son of man in the full expression of his 
power; lest we only see him in its hiding; 
in the infinite grace of the great salvation. 

The final coming of the Son of man was 
portrayed in the Gospels, with hosts of 
mighty angels to do his bidding. Then 
those at the mill and those in the field shall 
be separated, the one saved, the other lost; 
then the sun shall be sackcloth, the moon 
blood, the sea and the waves roaring; then 
the great day of his wrath shall come, and 
who shall be able to stand ? So this Apoc- 
alypse enters heaven to heighten the warn- 



144 Studies of Bible Truths, 

ing. It uses all the machinery of its angels, 
trumpets, voices, thunders, earthquakes, and 
lightnings to awaken us to the terrors of 
the last day ; when the throne of the Judge 
shall be wheeled to the front: that we be 
ready; for his coming shall be as the flash 
of lightning, and in a time of false security. 
**What I say unto one, I say unto all, 
Watch!'' 

The Lion of Juda. 

" From the prej, mj son, thou art gone up." (Gen. 
xlix. 9.) 

" We must take again as the key of all right inter- 
pretation that ancient myth, if any prefer to call it so, 
of the Hero Messiah, who is announced in the begin- 
ning of Genesis; the suffering, warring, conquering 
Messiah, whose last great battle with the foe is so 
graphically described in the closing book of Revela- 
tion. It is all along one divine plan. It is the history 
of Redemption; no longer now the critic's fragmen- 
tary Iliad, but the most unique, as it is immeasurably 
the grandest, of epics." (Tayler Lewis.) 

Gadara furnished the Son of man a field 
for the illustration of his power over the 
chief adversary; but what field shall suf- 



The Apocaly^pse of Jesus Christ, 145 

fice to display the might of his arm against 
the red dragon, the fallen angels, the false 
prophet, the beast, the scarlet adulteress of 
the seven-hilled city, and the great harlot 
sitting in the midst of the waters? What 
vision can display the overthrow of earth's 
pride, the end of the commercial and mer- 
cantile aggrandizement of Babylon in its 
defiant attitude toward the King of kings ? 
In this inspired panorama, as its events 
pass in solemn procession to the end of 
time, we may see the prophetic triumph 
of *'the Lion of Juda." This is set forth 
by the Holy Spirit. Christ is the center of 
all its issues; the glory of its excellency; 
the substance of its pealing anthems, the 
head of its armies, the crushing anathema 
of its judgments, the power of its resurrec- 
tion. The first part of the second Psalm 
describes the riches of his mercy; the 
second part the terror of his wrath. The 
first was fulfilled on Mount Hermon in the 

Transfiguration ; the second waits upon the 
10 



146 Studies of Bible Truths, 

fearful drama of this Apocalypse. The ex- 
ceeding riches of his grace are displayed in 
the glory of the mount; but his power and 
coming as the King of kings are held back 
until the end of time: "In the mount it 
shall be seen" — when this age shall pass 
away, as the sun disappears at its setting, 
and another shall begin, in which shall be 
" a new heaven and a new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness." 

Directly after the events of Christ's in- 
auguration there occurred his crucifixion 
and resurrection. It is wonderful to con- 
template the protracted methods of divine 
providence in their history: God's great 
love in the gift of his Son, and the love 
which Christ had for us ; the length of his 
sojourn with us before his death; the lin- 
gering distinctness of that shrouded trag- 
edy, upon which heaven and earth waited ; 
its repeated judicial process, the agonizing 
sentence; its inconceivable humiliations at 
the hands of priests, rulers, and people; 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Chi'ist, 147 

the buff e tings, the scourging, the array- 
ing, the jeering — **He saved others, let 
him save himself!" And also the leisure- 
ly steps and pauses of his resurrection. 
Not a speedy, direct, completed revelation, 
but with many intervals of intercourse, of 
appearance and disappearance, extending 
through forty days ; as if ascending to his 
Father and ours, his God and ours; and 
then descending. This employment of time 
had in it the feature of reducing these pow- 
ers of life to permanent law: that of the 
resurrection to a law of regeneration ; that 
of the death of Christ to a universal *' pro- 
pitiation through faith in his blood." 

The shock of His death was felt by the 
entire creation, both of nature and spirit. 
The sun, the temple, the dead, the graves, 
the earth itself, the dying thieves, and the 
watching soldiery, all responded to the tre- 
mendous instant when the Son became 
''obedient to the death of the cross." The 
transcript of his form, incandescent with 



148 Studies of Bible Truths. 

the glory of the holy mount, to the opening 
vision of the Apocalypse would show that 
the same purpose controlled both events. 
The one was the glory of his humiliation; 
the other the glory of his exaltation. All 
the imagery, all the personal grandeur at 
command of the Spirit, whether of the 
high estates of heaven, or of the Church, 
its prophets, martyrs, apostles, all are em- 
ployed in setting forth the sublime Person 
who is the theme of this poem. '* To know 
him " is the end of life, both here and here- 
after. 

The Ascension. 

*'What and if ye shall see the Son of 
man ascend up where he was before !" was 
the announcement of Christ to his disciples. 
This they did see. It constituted a link 
which united earth and heaven, the visible 
and the invisible worlds. It was not a re- 
appearance, but a continuous appearance of 
the spiritual body of Christ, that first of all 
met the gaze of St. John on Patmos. AU 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 149 

weakness had been left on the cross. He 
now stood the conscious Master of death 
and hell. '*A spirit hath not flesh and 
bones as ye see me have," said the risen 
Lord; "and when he had thus spoken, he 
showed them his hands and his f eet. ' ' The 
presence of that body gives substance to all 
else in the invisible world. He is there in 
the incarnate glory of eternal life. That 
which the disciple saw on Hermon was but 
a single flash of his abiding luster. We 
have now in heaven a Person with all the 
attributes of manhood which he had while 
on earth. 

From His personality we can conceive 
that of the Father, and that of the Holy 
Spirit. Until his own divine person had 
been illustrated to us by his life, death, and 
ascension, we were not prepared for re- 
ceiving the Spirit. Therefore the Spirit 
was not given until Christ had entered into 
glory. Then he came as promised by the 
Father and sent by the Son. This was 



150 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

the Saviour's greater care, that we should 
recognize the Comforter, and that to him 
was committed the vicegerency of the 
Redeemer over the Church and over the 
world. High over all else are heard the 
letters of the Saviour to the churches of 
Asia, in their official installation of the 
Spirit; while the symbols of fire, which by 
and by appeared at Pentecost on the heads 
of the apostles in cloven tongues, are now 
seen about the throne; "the seven lamps 
of fire, which are the seven spirits of God" 
— those prismatic rays of the divine glory 
by which he illumined the floods of chaos. 
It is he that utters all that is written in this 
revelation of the majesty of the Son, of the 
thunder of his power. The sublime im- 
agery of the Spirit is seen here and in the 
writings of the prophets of Israel, in their 
efforts to reach the ideal of a coming Mes- 
siah ; as Sirius, that hugest sphere of light, 
throws his beams far in advance of his pres- 
ence, upon the line of his approach. 



The Afocalyj)se of Jesus Christ. 151 

In these opening visions the distinct Per- 
sons of the Trinity are presented both to 
the eye and the ear of him who readeth. 
That great truth, which was reserved as 
the revelation which, above all else, should 
be made by the Messiah, in evidence of his 
divine presence and coming, now throws its 
light upon every shifting scene of this im- 
mortal drama. 

The Wine Press. 

"The imprecatory Psalms constitute one of the 
* moral difficulties' of the Old Testament. They are 
the seventh, thirty-fifth, sixty-ninth, and one hundred 
and ninth. They startle us because they are not 
merely prophetic of the downfall of the sinner, but 
express a real desire, a passionate prayer, that God's 
vengeance may take its course, and that good may tri- 
umph over evil." (The Oxford Bible.) 

"The passages are to be regarded in the light of 
prayers to God that he would vindicate himself against 
those w^ho have outraged his attributes of justice, mer- 
cy, and truth : they are offered by one who had a keen 
sense of the conflict going on between good and evil, 
between Israel and the enemies of Israel's God." 
(Teacher's Bible.) 



152 Studies of Bible Truths. 

There are in these four Psalms the fol- 
lowing passages, which are attributed by 
the evangelists to the Messiah: 

Sixty-ninth. " For the zeal of thine house hath 
eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that re- 
proached thee are fallen upon me. . . . They gave 
me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave 
me vinegar to drink." 

One hundred and ninth. '* They compassed me 
about also w^ith words of hatred; and fought against 
me without a cause. For my love they are my ad- 
versaries. . . . They have rewarded me evil for good, 
and hatred for my love. . . . Help me, O Lord my 
God: O save me according to thy mercy: that they 
may know that this is thy hand ; that thou, Lord, hast 
done it." 

Thirty-fifth. " With hypocritical mockers in feasts, 
they gnashed upon me with their teeth. Lord, how 
long wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their de- 
structions, my darling from the lions. . . . Stir up 
thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my 
cause, my God and my Lord. Judge me, O Lord, my 
God, according to thy righteousness; and let them not 
rejoice over me." 

Seventh. " O Lord my God, in thee do I put my 
trust: save, me from all them that persecute me, and 
deliver me: lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it 
in pieces." 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 153 

No impression of the human heart is 
more deeply seated than the thought that 
the wicked ought to be punished, and God 
ought to overthrow with an eternal destruc- 
tion all that love iniquity and hate right- 
eousness. And so doubtless it will be that 
*' whosoever falls on this stone shall be bro- 
ken; but on whomsoever it falls it shall 
grind him to powder." The impenitent 
shall be cut down. The imprecatory pas- 
sages in the Psalms are many; they are 
part of the psalmody of the Church, lest it 
should suppose from God's mercy that he 
is indifferent to the wickedness that reigns 
and often triumphs in the earth. It is to this 
judgment that the Son of man goes forth 
as a man of war, as the lion to his prey, 
and by his own might puts an end to Satan 
and sin. 

The Psalms are the prayers of Him who 
was hated without cause; the Redeemer 
who held scribes and Pharisees and Jerusa- 
lem to a strict reckoning as the children of 



154 Studies of Bible Truths, 

those who had shed the blood of prophets, 
and thirsted for his blood. As the twenty- 
second Psalm w^as framed by the Spirit 
to express the anguish of Christ upon the 
cross, so these Psalms were framed as ex- 
pressive of the anathema of the Son of 
God against those who abet the throne of 
iniquity. 

To suppose that the enmity which com- 
passed the death of God's Anointed will go 
unpunished, is to hold God himself respon- 
sible for the greatest crime in the annals of 
human or superhuman depravity. To hold 
no one responsible, is to invalidate the doc- 
trine of man's freedom and responsibility. 
To condone the greatest crime, is virtually 
to neutralize the offense of sin and the ex- 
istence of law. 

The declaration in the opening sentence 
of this epic, ** Behold he cometh with 
clouds; and every eye shall see him, and 
they also which pierced him ; and all kin- 
dreds of the earth shall w^ail because of 



The A-pocalypse of Jesus Christ. 155 

him; even so, Amen," reveals itself in all 
the terrors of the first six seals, and in the 
cry of the great men of the earth to the 
mountains, "Fall on us, and hide us from 
the face of him that sitteth on the throne, 
and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the 
great day of his wrath is come; and who 
shall be able to stand?" The elements of 
war, victory, famine, death, delayed venge- 
ance, with the catastrophe, are held at the 
command of him who is the Prince of the 
kings of the earth, the Lion of the tribe of 
Juda. The infinite grace of a Redeemer 
is altogether consistent with the vengeance 
of him **that cometh from Edom, with 
dyed garments from Bozrah." "Where- 
fore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy 
garments like him that treadeth in the wine 
fat? I have trodden the wine press alone; 
and of the people there was none with me: 
for I will tread them in mine anger, and 
trample them in my fury; and their blood 
shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and 



156 Studies of Bible Truths. 

I will stain all my raiment. For the day of 
vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of 
my redeemed is come.'* 

Eighteen hundred years have not proved 
adequate to overcome the enmity of rulers 
and kings of the earth against the Lord 
and against his Anointed. *'He that sit- 
teth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord 
shall have them in derision. Then shall he 
speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them 
in his sore displeasure. . . . Thou shalt 
break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt 
dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. 
Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be in- 
structed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the 
Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. 
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye per- 
ish from the way, when his wrath is kin- 
dled but a little." 

Will this time of reckoning ever come? 
Is there not in the atonement an implied 
shelter against all revelation of the right- 
eous anger of God? This inspired epic 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 157 

answers that inquiry. // reveals the Lamb 
as the Lion of the Tribe of Juda. The 
one ** mighty to save," who by the might 
of his sympathy has driven back the shad- 
ow on the dial more than once, at the last 
reveals an exhausted patience and a fierce 
revulsion from mercy to wrath. This final 
judgment the Spirit unrolls in these visions, 
and reveals the Son of man in the glory of 
eternal right. We may never have con- 
ceived of him who is both *'able to save 
and to destroy": who can say to those 
upon whom he has expended the wealth 
of his love in vain, "Depart from me; I 
never knew you." 

The breaking of the fifth seal introduced 
those who had been martyred for the word 
of God and for the testimony which they 
held. '*And they cried with a loud voice, 
saying, How long, O Lord, hol}^ and true, 
dost thou not judge and avenge our blood 
on them that dwell on the earth?" These 
were saints of the Old Testament; the 



158 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

great spirits that were sealed in their fore- 
heads, one hundred and forty and four 
thousand of the children of Israel. " These 
are they which have come out of great trib- 
ulation, and have washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 
He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell 
among them." 

Satan Overthrown. 

When the seventh seal was broken, the 
seven trumpets in it were handed to the 
seven angels that stood before God. Apol- 
lyon is revealed. ** Michael and his angels 
fought against the dragon ; and the dragon 
fought and his angels and prevailed not; 
neither was their place found any more in 
heaven. And the great dragon was cast 
out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and 
Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: 
he was cast out into the earth, and his an- 
gels were cast out with him." This terri- 
ble defeat in heaven was but preparatory 



The A^ocaly^se of Jesus Christ, 159 

to Satan's renewal of war, on the earth, 
against the Lamb. But again there was a 
victory over the dragon and the beast. In 
the end of this conflict St. John saw a Lamb 
standing on Mount Zion, *'and with him 
a hundred and forty and four thousand, 
having his Father's name written in their 
foreheads." He heard the sea and the 
thunder, and the voice of harpers harping 
upon their harps. They sang a new song. 
"These are they which follow the Lamb 
whithersoever he goeth. . . . They are 
without fault before the throne of God." 
The judgment of fallen angels follows: 
** They were cast into the great wine press 
of the wrath of God." 

The Catastrophe. 

The huge labor of breaking up the earth 
now begins: the living stand before the 
throne, on a sea of glass mingled with fire; 
"they sing the song of Moses the servant 
of God, and the song of the Lamb; , . . 



i6o Studies of Bible Truths, 

Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glo- 
rify thy name? for thou only art holy; for 
all nations shall come and worship before 
thee; for thy judgments are made mani- 
fest." And one of the cherubim gave 
unto the seven angels seven vials full of 
the wrath of God, who liveth forever and 
ever. The earth is broken up in sections, 
as an iron rod might break a potter's ves- 
sel. The Lion of the tribe of Juda, travel- 
ing in the greatness of his might, is equal 
to the work. His righteousness is like the 
great mountains, his judgments are a great 
deep. The evangelist is taken by the Spir- 
it to several standing points, the wilder- 
ness, the seashore, and Mount Zion, where 
he may see the judgments of the Almighty. 
These judgments belong to the history of 
One who is the King of nations. They are 
world-wide, affecting states and govern- 
ments, and the solid globe itself. They 
reach yet farther — they issue from him 
who is King of the ages. He overthrows 



The Afocalypse of Jesus Christ. i6i 

all who will not have him to reign over 

them, whose seats are among the hierarchies 

of an invisible world. There is therefore 

nothing of narrow interpretation in these 

prophecies. This latest utterance of the 

Word reaches to the end of all things; 

when heaven will contain all the good, and 

the lake burning with fire, prepared for the 

devil and his angels, will contain all the 

wicked. 

Battle Hymns. 

There are all through the Apocalypse 
pagans of victory; some of them sung be- 
fore the battle, but the greater number aft- 
er. All of them, excepting the ceaseless 
hymn before the Divine Majesty, in the 
fourth chapter, are in honor of the Lamb. 
In thirteen distinct chapters these martial 
hymns are either to God and the Lamb, or 
exclusively to the Lamb ; and to none else 
are these victories ascribed. However in- 
volved these wars, whether in the region of 

men, or of angels, or that of the dragon, 
11 



i62 Studies of Bible Truths, 

the victory is ascribed to the blood of the 
Lamb — that is, to the death of the Son of 
man. It matters but little by what forms 
or names the enemies of God are described, 
or to what periods of time they belong, 
whether earlier or later, the main thing 
which the Spirit reveals in this epic is the 
Right Arm of the tribe of Juda, against the 
ungodly ; that by * ' the sword of his mouth 
they are slain ; as Elijah the Tishbite slew 
the captains sent by Ahaziah to arrest 
him, by calling fire down from heaven (2 
Kings i.) upon them. These enemies are 
the worldly power arrayed openly against 
Christ; the power of false prophets; the 
power of *'the great harlot, that sitteth 
upon many waters" ( ?), arrayed in purple 
and scarlet, decked with gold and precious 
stones, having a golden cup in her hand, 
full of abominations, and upon her fore- 
head a name written, Mystery, Babylon 
the Great; drunken with the blood of the 
saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 163 

Jesus." Of whom it is said, *' These shall 
make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb 
shall overcome them, for he is Lord of 
lords and King of kings." 

Symbols. 

The use of emblems, types, and cere- 
monies was characteristic of the Levitical 
system, ordained of God and instituted by 
Moses. They are introduced in the pro- 
phetic writings, and constitute a prophet- 
ical vocabulary, which is in the main con- 
fined to the scriptures of the Old Testa- 
ment — specially those of Daniel, Ezekiel, 
and Zechariah. It is remarkable that the 
closing book of the New Testament should 
employ the symbolic language, when all its 
other Gospels, Epistles, both general and 
pastoral, have a clear and simple style of 
speech, such as becomes the actual pres- 
ence of Him who was to come. Does the 
Apocalypse indicate by this that it is direct- 
ed specially to Israel; or that it employs a 



164 Studies of Bible Truths. 

symbolic style to describe that which is 
prophetic and intended for the whole Gen- 
tile world; or that to the inspired words 
spoken there are now added these visions 
for the eye of him who having ears hears 
not? 

As the revelation of Jesus Chnst includes 
in its breadth the life beyond, the affairs of 
angels, the doom of the ungodly, the judg- 
ment of all in heaven, earth, and hell, we 
m^ay not wonder at the employment of all 
methods of speech, hieroglyphic or other, 
which men have used. All should be used 
that can portray the Christ of God as the 
King of the ages ; as the vindicator of eter- 
nal right; who by the word of his mouth 
called the universe into light, and by the 
same word now drives it back into the 
abyss of chaos ; who brings down from the 
heights of heaven a new world, beautiful 
as a bride, for the home of his redeemed. 
Let all be employed that can raise the hu- 
man race to a just thought of the Father's 



The Aj()ocaIypse of Jesus Christ, 165 

love, of the Son's majesty, and of the life- 
giving power of the Spirit, whose lamps of 
fire have kindled and fed the fadeless gran- 
deur of this Book of the ages. 

There is a charm for many minds in 
symbolism, as there is for rhythm, and for 
mathematical calculation. Sir Isaac New- 
ton, and Sir John Napier, the inventor of 
logarithms, spent years in ciphering out the 
** times " and ** half-times " of Daniel, and 
the heads and horns of the composite beasts 
in the prophets that represented the powers 
and forces in array against Jehovah; and 
the periods which seemed to measure the 
duration of the kingdoms of the earth, and 
of time itself. The end of all things has 
been fixed by philosophic genius again 
and again; but the earth still turns on its 

axis. (^) 

The Judge. 

After the defeat and punishment of Sa- 
tan, and the overthrow of Gog and Magog, 
gathered together for battle, as the sand of 



i66 Studies of Bible Truths. 

the sea in number, the Son of man is re- 
vealed as the Judge eternal, omnipotent: 
**I saw a great white throne, and him that 
sat on it, from whose face the earth and 
the heaven fled away; and there was found 
no place for them. And I saw the dead, 
small and great, stand before God; and 
the books were opened: and another book 
was opened, which is the book of life ; and 
the dead were judged out of those things 
which were written in the books, according 
to their works. And the sea gave up the 
dead which were in it; and death and hell 
delivered up the dead which were in them : 
and they were judged every man according 
to their works. And death and hell were 
cast into the lake of Are. This is the sec- 
ond death. And whosoever was not found 
written in the book of life was cast into the 
lake of fire." 

These final acts, the judgment and the 
resurrection, that open out into an eternal 
existence, had been presented all through 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 167 

the Gospels and Epistles, without color; 
and now that which should be addressed to 
the eye was needed to intensify the fearful 
truth of human accountability. It would 
seem that the Holy Spirit has taken what 
colors remained after the creation of light, 
and thrown them upon the canvas of this 
epic, for the illumination, the rapture, and 
the guidance of the Church, along the 
route that leads to the gates of the city of 
God. 

The Saviour at the tomb of Lazarus pre- 
ceded his miracle by a discourse, in which 
he declared himself to be the resurrection. 
He said to Martha, ** Thy brother shall rise 
again." **I know," replied Martha, *'that 
he shall rise again in the resurrection at the 
last day." Jesus said unto her, *' I am the 
resurrection and the life." And of that 
truth this is the scenic statement: ^^The 
first resurrection''^ ; ^'A thousand years as 
07ie day.''' Upon these two passages cer- 
tain systems of speculative thought have 



i68 Studies of Bible Truths, 

built a millennial kingdom; and the reign 
of Christ, personal, upon the earth, ante- 
dating the new Jerusalem, the city of God. 
The binding of Satan takes its beginning 
from the Incarnation. Christ came to de- 
stroy the works of the devil. He encoun- 
tered him more than once while on earth, 
and defeated him in the Temptation, and 
in '* casting out devils by the Spirit of 
God " ; in hurling the *' legion " of Gadara 
into the abyss of hell; and in permanently 
relieving humanity of demoniac possession. 
So that he said, *' Now is the prince of this 
world cast out ; now is the judgment of this 
world." ** I saw," said he, ** Satan fall as 
lightning from heaven." We are there- 
fore in this period of indefinite length, 
called '* a thousand years," in which the 
great foe suffers restraint. '*A thousand 
years in thy sight are but as yesterday 
when it is past, and as a watch in the 
night." Elsewhere, *' a thousand years 
with the Lord are as one day, and one day 



The Afocalyfse of Jestts Christ. 169 

as a thousand years"; in other words, 
time with God is not estimated by revolv- 
ing planets: time and space are created by 
him for man, but he himself is the btfgin- 
ning. 

A *' first resurrection" has reference to 
a second — that is, to the time when all that 
are in their graves shall hear his voice and 
come forth; but the first is the one of which 
Christ says, *' The hour is coming, and now 
is, when the dead shall hear the voice of 
the Son of God, and they that hear shall 
live "; a resurrection from the death of sin 
to the life of righteousness — the new birth 
— when those that are dead in trespasses 
and sins are quickened by ** the power that 
raised Christ from the dead." 

We may well say with Peter on the holy 
mount, ** It is good for us to be here " ; in 
the reign of the King of glory; when by 
the Spirit of God we are translated from 
the power of Satan into the kingdom of 
God's dear Son. 



lyo Studies of Bible Truths, 

Christ was the woman's promised seed who bruised 
the serpent's head. (Gen. iii. 15.) This the first prom- 
ise was fulfilled hy the Incarnation. "The Son of 
God was manifested, that he might destroy the works 
of the devil." (i John iii. 8.) At the first advent 
Christ declared: " If I cast out devils by the Spirit of 
God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you. Or 
else, how can one enter into a strong man's house, 
and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong 
man.?" (Matt. xii. 28, 29.) John now explains that 
Christ had already laid hold on the dragon, the old 
serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound 
him for a thousand years. From the date of this first 
advent, therefore, the thousand years, symbolizing a 
great but indefinite period, take their beginning. — 
Speaker's Commentary. 

Justice and Mercy. 

Without a due sense of God's justice 
there can be no true sense of God's mercy. 
"Ye are not come," says St. Paul, **unto 
the mount that might be touched, and that 
burned with fire, nor unto blackness and 
darkness and tempest; . . . but ye are come 
unto Mount Zion, andunto the city of the liv- 
ing God, the heavenly Jerusalem, ... to 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 171 

the general assembly and Church of the first- 
born, . . . and to Jesus the Mediator of the 
new covenant." It is the dark mountain 
that enables us to perceive the glory of 
Mount Zion, and to value "the blood of 
sprinkling, that speaketh better things than 
the blood of Abel." The inculcating this 
sense of God's justice was a large part of 
the history of God's dealing with Israel, 
in bringing them from Egypt to Canaan. 
The punishment of wicked men and wick- 
ed nations, and the fulmination of the ten 
commandments from Mount Sinai, pre- 
pared them and the world for the system 
of grace through the gift of God's Son, 
and the putting away sin by the one sacri- 
fice offered once for all. 

In the Book of Job the instinctive thought 
that bad men ought to be punished is sharp- 
ly accented by the wise men who came to 
comfort him. Their words so eloquent, on 
the side of justice, yet so mistaken in their 
application, furnished the bass notes of that 



172 Studies of Bible Truths, 

archaic anthem. As it was in the begin- 
ning of revealed truth, and in advance of 
the system of salvation through the merit of 
the Son of God, so is it at the conclusion of 
the inspired word. God's justice is held 
up. Christ will appear a second time as 
the vindicator of righteousness. Then 
** the Lamb," together with *' the wrath of 
the Lamb," shall mutually illustrate both 
the mercy and the justice of the Almighty. 
This ultimate visitation of judicial wrath 
is set forth in the Apocalypse as it was 
once before in the ashes of Sodom and 
Gomorrah, when fire descended at midday 
and burned into the earth its own inefface- 
able record. St. Peter draws from the his- 
tory of angels the yet fiercer declaration of 
justice against the disobedient and unbe- 
lieving: ** For if God spared not the angels 
that sinned, but cast them down to hell, 
and delivered them into chains of darkness, 
to be reserved unto judgment; . . . the 
Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 173 

of temptation, and to reserve the unjust 
unto the day of judgment to be punished. 
. . . For this they willingly are ignorant 
of, that by the word of God the heavens 
were of old, and the earth standing out of 
the water and in the water; whereby the 
world that then was, being overflowed with 
water, perished: but the heavens and the 
earth, which are now, by the same word 
are kept in store, reserved unto fire against 
the day of judgment and perdition of un- 
godly men." We are between the flood 
and the fire. God's justice was manifested 
in the universal flood, and will be again in 
a world on fire. 

A clear and constant apprehension of 
the Divine justice is essential to a just ap- 
preciation of his system of redeeming love. 
*' Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most 
Mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. 
And in thy majesty ride prosperously, be- 
cause of truth and meekness and righteous- 
ness; and thy right hand shall teach thee 



174 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

terrible things. Thine arrows are sharp in 
the heart of the King's enemies; whereby 
the people fall under thee. Thy throne, O 
God, is forever and ever: the scepter of 
thy kingdom is a right scepter. Thou lov- 
est righteousness, and hatest wickedness: 
therefore God, thy God, hath anointed 
thee with the oil of gladness above thy fel- 
lows.'' (Ps. xlv.) 

God's City. 

In the last visions of this Apocalypse the 
resting place of the redeemed, as prepared 
by Christ, is represented as a city let down 
from God, out of heaven, adorned as a 
bride for her husband. ** Behold, the tab- 
ernacle of God is with men, and he will 
dwell with them, and thev shall be his 
people, and God himself shall be with 
them, and be their God." How near, how 
precious, how homelike are these words! 
Could we imagine any fellowship higher, 
purer than this with our God ? 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 175 

**And God shall wipe away all tears from 
their eyes; and there shall be no more 
death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither 
shall there be any more pain : for the former 
things are passed away." Surely God is 
our Father, and we are his children ! 

*' But he that sat upon the throne said, 
. . . I am Alpha and Omega, the begin- 
ning and the end. I will give unto him 
that is athirst of the fountain of the water 
of life freely. He that overcometh shall 
inherit all things; and I will be his God, 
and he shall be my son." Surely he that 
speaks is our King, the Lord of lords ! 

One of the angels carried St. John away 
*'in the spirit to a great and high moun- 
tain," and he saw the glory of the land 
that is afar off, where the King sits in his 
beauty. '* The glory of God did lighten 
it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." 
How often has this vision filled the heart of 
dying saints, after all other light is extin- 
guished! — its amethyst and opal, its gates 



176 Studies of Bible Truths. 

of pearl, its transparent gold. How often 
has the dying, thirsty soul longed for that 
pure water of life, that river proceeding 
out of the throne of God and the Lamb I 
and to taste of those fruits, on either side 
of the river which makes glad the city of 
God. 

** Blessed are they that do his command- 
ments, that they may have right to the tree 
of life, and may enter in through the gates 
into the city." " He which testifieth these 
things, saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus ! " (*) 



NOTES. 



The Title. 

Note (^), page 131: '■^The Revelation^ Gr. inroKoXv^^iq. 
The Latin Fathers call it Revelatio^ the Revelation, 
properly; for matters before covered are revealed in 
this book. No prophecy in the Old Testament has 
this title: it was reserved for the one Revelation of Je- 
sus Christ, in the New Testament. . . . il/e» prefixed 
the title, the Revelation of John the Divine. . . . It is 
ancient indeed, but it implies that doubts had arisen 
respecting the writer of the Apocalypse; and these 
arose long after the age of the apostles; . . . and that 
there were other Apocalypses from which this true 
one must be distinguished." — (Bengel's Gnomon, vol. 
ii., p. 839.) 

"It Is Good for Us to Be Here. Let Us Make 
Three Tabernacles," etc. 

Note (2), page 135: "Not knowing what he said," 
says the evangelist. Had he known, he could not have 
said a better thing. 

"To Ife here:'' Where? 

(i) On the mount, in such company: it surelj*^ was 
12 (177) 



178 Studies of Bible Truths. 

next to heaven; possibly heaven for the while let 
dow^n upon the mount. The glory — the great ones of 
the past; the King, the Prophet, the Priest; the Trin- 
ity, only the Trinity and humanity — without obstruc- 
tion, or fear, or indistinctness of superangelic sur- 
roundings and presence. But all in the shelter of the 
Incarnate Son of God; standing between God and the 
' sinner, talking of the one offering about to be accom- 
plished at Jerusalem. 

(2) Historically here, in fulfillment of the prophecies 
respecting the Messiah. These prophecies respected 
especially his incarnation and his divine Sonship. 

Bengel's Calculations. 

Note ('), page 165: ''The final rage of Antichrist 
for three and a half years extends from A.D. 1832 to 
A.D. 1836. The fight with the beast from the abyss, 
and his overthrow by Christ's appearing on June 18, 
1836. From then to 2836 Satan was to be bound." 
But he admits that " if the year 1836 should pass with- 
out remarkable changes, there must be a fundamental 
error in it." — (Bengel's Gnomon, vol. ii., p. 832.) 

Object of the Apocalypse. 

Note (■*), page 176: The object of the Apocalypse 
is not "the triumph of Christianity over all opposition 
and enemies, and the temporal and eternal glory and 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 179 

happiness to which this triumph leads" — as Moses 
Stuart has it, in his valuable and elaborate work on 
this book; but the triumph of the Person, Christ Jesus, 
over all his enemies; and the glory of the Lamb, 
made the inheritance of the saints; his tabernacle 
their eternal home; and his name in their foreheads. 
He is "the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the 
end, the first and the last," " the bright and the morn- 
ing star " of this great prophecy. 



l8o Studies of Bible Truths, 

THE TRANSFIGURATION, 

Luke ix. 28. 

In greater Hermon's hoarj height, 
The blessed Lord of Holj light 

In prayer is found : 
There soon the wealth of heaven lay, 
As bright as Eden's Sabbath day, 

Empurpled rotmd. 

Three favored men, too worn to pray, 
In that aureate circle stay ; 

Asleep near heav'n: 
A latticed tent of opal threads 
And tinted beams rose o'er their heads, 

In glory wov'n. 

Lo! sparkling with celestial morn, 
Its steeds and ruby rims unworn, 

Elijah's car! 
And stepping from its golden seat. 
Two noble forms — their Lord to greet; 

They come from far. 

Since Sinai's fires and Horeb's storms, 
A thousand years have swept these forms, 

Immortal still; 
Th' Eternal Son they come to see. 
Enthroned in purest majesty. 

On Zion's hill. 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. i8i 

To see upon his shoulders laid 
That priestly robe, by angels made, 

Ever to be ; 
Melchizedek's, of Salem's line, 
Who Abram blest, with bread and wine, 

In victory. 
To see the form of Him who spoke 
The Law, with awful thunder-stroke, 

When rocks were riv'n; 
When Sinai's top was all aflame, 
And trumpet sounding loud his fame 

Was blown by Heav'n. 

His sacrificial vest to see, 
Love's oldest, deepest mystery — 

Its Love impaled; 
To see that Form with love aglow, 
Whiter than Hermon's virgin snow — 

Soon to be nailed! 

All luminous, with changeful ray 
Of glory lands far, far away, 

Each noble one; 
But presently they pale before 
Eternal morn in sevenfold power — 

The Firstborn Son. 

" O noblest Son of Adam's race! 
Firstborn of Love! before thy face 
All splendors pale. 



t82 Studies of Bible Truths, 

O Lord of lords, thou beauteous King! 
Myriads of greetings now we bring — 
O Christ, all hail!" 

"With those glad hosts I soon shall be; 
Lean o'er these battlements, and see — 

The gates of Hell." 
Reversing flash of things to be. 
Behold! a darkened mystery, 

No tongue can tell. 

They hear the cry, " My God, my God," 
They see the nail, the spear, the blood — 

Him crucified! 
" O blessed Lord, is this for me?" 
" My father's friends, for thee — for thee— 

One must have died." 

And now the Cross its sunset threw 
O'er all the mount — the crimson hue 

Of dying Love ; 
O'er men its ruddy shelter thrown — 
The fiercer glory sifting down 

From God above. 

No angels mingle in that scene, 

But God with men — God's Lamb between — 

Is pleased to tent: 
They wake! as in the holy place! 
For God is near — they see his face — 

Life's veil has rent! 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 183 

As on the pavement where he stood, 
When Israel's nobles ate with God, 

A sapphire blue ; 
His hair the purest glory white; 
His hands and feet of solid light, 

A roseate hue. 

Two witnesses! of Law, of Faith, 
In depth or height, by life or death, 

Are next the King; 
For them his hosts in column wait, 
To pass with him the lifted gate — 

His might to sing. 

Lo! pillared high a cloud appears, 
God's martial cloak for forty years, 

And glory shroud ; 
In desert march at Israel's head, 
Mid crags and peaks, with lightnings red, 

And echoes loud. 

" O God how good! here let us stay, 
Where heaven's morning curtains day, 

And all is peace; 
Far from the storms of earth beneath. 
On every brow a golden wreath, 

The wealth of grace. 

"The Spirit's life no longer waits; 
The King of Glory lifts the gates 
Omnipotent; 



184 Studies of Bible Truths. 

Let's clothe, O Lord, these men of might 
In thy pure flesh and crimson light, 
Jehovah's tent." 

'Tis Peter speaks — ^bold speaker he; 
Lost in prophetic ecstasy — 

So near the throne. 
The cloud! a Voice — the abyss of love: 
" To ages, w^orlds, beneath, above, 

This is My Son." 

This voice of Majesty they fear; 

The prophets gone — the mountain drear — 

The Lord's alone! 
The Son, transfigured back to earth, 
Disrobes Himself of Kingly worth, 

And stays t' atone. 

THE RESURRECTION. 

"And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them 
that they should tell no man -what things they had seen, till the Son 
of man Avere risen from the dead. And they kept that saying \vith 
themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the 
dead should mean." (Mark ix. 9, 10.) 

Full twenty thousand chariot* stood, 
Not far from where the Son of God — 

The Christ — hung dead. 
Th' archangels saw a piteous sight, 
The Lord of glory swathed in white, 

With bruised head ! 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. 185 

The seraphim in phalanx move, 
Where sleeps his flesh, incarnate Love, 

In Joseph's tomb: 
The angels watch at head and feet, 
To see his glory break, complete, 

From Death's dark womb. 

An angel, flashing lightning's light, 
Breaks bar and seal of Satan's might; 

His gates o'erthrown: 
A wreck of empire strews the ground. 
And terror flies the awful sound. 

At Death's last groan. 

Ere pearly morn had broke the gloom, 
Forth bursts the Prince of life's fair bloom — 

Th' Eternal Man ! 
Through Eden's amaranthine bowers. 
Through awful heights of heavenly powers. 

The glory ran. 

The Marys came, with precious nard; 
They saw, they heard the angel guard, 

" He is not dead." 
A rustic Form stands in the way ! 
" Sir, hast thou borne him hence ? " they say ; 

"Mary!" he said. 

On mountain height or dusty road, 
He came, he went, and often showed 
His person true. 



i86 Studies of Bible Truths. 

" Come see," said he, " these prints of love, 
Ere I shall laj them up above, 
To plead for you." 

For forty days revealing still 
The resurrection power at will, 

Mid joy and fear; 
Now he ascends upon the air, 
Nor wing, nor wheel, nor angel's stair; 

By Spirit sheer. 

Majestic, slow, he rises higher! 
Nor glory, nor celestial fire — 

The Man alone! 
His face and hands, in blessing, bright; 
A yielding cloud — he melts in light! 

Up tow'rd the throne. 

See! Whence this pomp, and throng divine? 
Jesus has crossed the tropic line 

Where glory burns: 
These hoary kings of ancient reign 
And captive myriads grace his train; 

The Lord returns! 

Along the route of highest state, 
Proud columns hail, with joy elate, 

The Firstborn King! 
While terraced thrones and spirits bright, 
His arms and crown of solid light, 

Responsive sing. 



The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, 187 



In Godhead's bright abjss he stands, 
His every look a heaven commands ; 

Th' Anointed One! 
The exceeding riches of his grace — 
God's richest glory in his face ; 

Th' Incarnate Son! 



IV. 

The First Resurrection. 

We are indebted to Christ's daily visits 
to the temple, and his encounters with the 
Sadducees, scribes, and Pharisees, for his 
profoundest statement of the Divine pur- 
pose in his incarnation. The casuistry, 
Levitical holiness, and sheer atheism, which 
questioned, analyzed, and utterly rejected 
the Son of God, brought out the sublime 
wealth of his divine-human nature, as the 
promised Messiah. In the cloister of that 
magnificent structure the Saviour opens 
this superhuman claim to the intellect of 
man, for conviction of error or of blas- 
phemy, of the least infirmity or the greatest 
sin. It was in response to their fierce con- 
tention that he declared himself to be the 
Son of the Father; thus, as they said, mak- 
ing himself equal with God. 
(188) 



The First Resurrection, 189 

In the present passage he afRrms that he 
possesses inherent power of hfe over death, 
and of life eternal: **For as the Father 
hath life in himself, so hath he given to the 
Son to have life in himself. . . . For as 
the Father raised up the dead, and quick- 
eneth them, even so the Son quickeneth 
whom he will." It is in the full outburst 
of this heavenly revelation that the text 
occurs : '* Verily^ verily^ I say unto you. He 
that heareth my word, and helieveth on him 
that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall 
not come into condemnation ; but is fassed 
from death unto lifeJ*^ (John v. 24.) 

Let us consider, 

I. The Revealed Hope of Immortality, 
The three persons whose death gave to 
humanity a visible display of immortal life 
were Enoch, Elijah, and Christ. ** Enoch 
was translated, that he should not see 
death ; and was not found because God had 
translated him ; for before his translation he 
had this testimony, that he pleased God." 



190 Studies of Bihle Truths, 

The Old Testament confirms this wonder- 
ful history: '*That Enoch walked with 
God three hundred years. . . . And he 
was not; for God took him." Such a life 
of fellowship with God, in the midst of the 
corrupt antediluvians, must have had wide 
repute; and its sudden, mysterious termi- 
nation must have left an impress upon the 
history of men, only less than that made by 
the disasters of the flood. 

This signal statement of man's immortal- 
ity was doubly precious after that terrible 
visitation of divine justice. As a triumph 
of faith it abides, in the inspired record of 
St. Paul, for the ages. Next to that of 
Christ, it was the greatest of faith's achieve- 
ments. It secured the witness of the Spirit 
that God was pleased with his servant; it 
displayed a power over death in advance of 
the Saviour's ascension, and expressed a 
power of life at the last day, when Christ 
shall be revealed with ten thousand saints. 

The emphasis given to the translation of 



The First Resurrection. 191 

Enoch was further impressed upon man- 
kind by the testimony of Job, that after 
the worms had destroyed his body, yet in 
his flesh he should see God. These con- 
stituted a classic and crowning testimony to 
the doctrine of an ultimate deliverance from 
the obstruction and tyranny of death — one 
which had its influence upon the patriarch- 
al period, and upon all the traditions which 
constituted the general sum of human hope. 
That the experience of Enoch's faith, and 
the translation of his body and spirit by 
God, should be set forth by St. Paul, in his 
letter to the Hebrews, as one of the great- 
est instances of the cooperative power of 
man with the power of God, gives the 
event itself the highest place in the history 
of man. The translating power of faith 
was recognized by the Spirit thus far in ad- 
vance of the resurrection of Christ. It was 
still further emphasized by the chariot and 
steeds sent for Elijah, who knew in ad- 
vance that God was about to send for him. 



192 Studies of Bible Truths, 

We see in all this that supernatural care 
of divine truth which God extended to 
Abraham and continued through the his- 
tory and providence which guided Israel; 
and in its long line of inspired kings, proph- 
ets, priests, and martyrs, which held hu- 
manity in hope until a Saviour should come 
and deliver his people from the power 
and fear of death. This culminated in the 
prophecy of Isaiah (xxvi. 19) in that seem- 
ingly impossible passage: "Thy dead men 
shall live, together with my dead body 
shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that 
dwell in dust, for thy dew is as the dew of 
herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead ' ' 
(as evening dew revives plants). *'This 
may be fitly accommodated," says Mat- 
thew Henry, ''(i) to the spiritual resur- 
rection of those that were dead in sin, by 

IT 

the power of Christ's gospel and grace; 
(2) to the last resurrection, when dead 
saints shall live, and rise together with 
Christ's dead body; for he arose as the 



The J^zrst J^esurrectzon. 193 

first fruits of a harvest, and believers shall 
arise by virtue of their union with him." 

Let us next consider, 

II. The Natural Ho^e of Immortality . 
Death was the one great terror to man ; 
and length of life did not make death any 
the less a fearful disaster. The Egyptians 
held the remains of the truth so far as hu- 
man nature might retain it; that there was 
to be ultimately a resurrection; that there 
were united in man a body, a soul, and a 
divine emanation; that after death these 
would at last be reunited, and would search 
for each other. They relied on tradition 
that a man had been taken up, body and 
soul, into the heavens — a man of singular 
purity and piety, and of marvelous ac- 
quaintance with the invisible God. 

This intense desire for eternal life re- 
mained to them, and yet awaits the coming 
of the Son of man; '*when all who are in 
the graves shall come forth." It built their 
pyramids and temples; it excavated rocks 



194 Studies of Bible Truths, 

and mountains in expressing the mightiness 
of their hope. There could be no greater 
statement of a natural sense of immortal 
beings than were their huge labors in the 
valley of the Nile, during a period of sev- 
eral thousand years, beginning a few years 
after the flood and continuing down to 1500 
B.C. All this time they embalmed and se- 
creted the bodies of all who died. They 
held that at death the elements which had 
composed human life were separated, but 
remained intact, both as to quality and 
quantity; that by and by, the Sahn, the 
Soul, and Khu, an emanation of the divine 
intelligence, would return to the body, if 
preserved, and all would live together 
again. 

In 1881, July 5, M. Mantle-Bey found at 
Thebes a catacomb containing the kings, 
royal priests, princes, princesses, and no- 
bles of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nine- 
teenth, and twenty-first dynasties of thirty- 
five centuries (the twentieth not represent- 



The First Resurrection, 195 

ed), lying in state, arranged side by side. 
In the group were the greatest royal build- 
ers, the most renowned warriors, the might- 
iest monarchs of ancient Egypt, including 
Thothmes III., Seti I., and Rameses II. 
They now lie in glass cases, sealed from 
the owl, the moth, and the flitter-mouse, 
in the magnificent palace of Gizeh, in 
Cairo. 

There were seventy pyramids built from 
3067 B.C., and many grand temples and 
huge statues that attest this mighty faith 
of Egypt; that all would live again, in im- 
mortal conscious beings, and in that affec- 
tion which in an hour of bereavement finds 
relief in the hope of again meeting those 
we love. What a statement was this of the 
great truth in the statues, weapons, amu- 
lets, jewels, furniture, food, and written 
documents on papyrus, linen, and leather, 
found in these recesses of hope ! A distin- 
guished writer. Miss Edwards, has given us 
some idea of the vast amount of yet undis- 



196 Studies of Bible Truths. 

covered treasures: '' If you but stamp your 
foot upon the sand, you know that it prob- 
ably awakens an echo in some dark hall or 
corridor untrod of man for three or four 
thousand years. The mummied genera- 
tions are everywhere, in the bowels of the 
mountains, in the face of the cliffs, in the 
rock-cut labyrinths which underlie the sur- 
face of the desert." 

The amazing wealth demanded for build- 
ing its pyramids and temples had another 
inspiration ; each of these pyramids was an 
altar to the sun. It was cased with pol- 
ished granite, and flashed as a mirror the 
beams of the midday splendor back to their 
source. It was in the heart of such an al- 
tar that each dynasty prepared its resting 
place. Upon the structure was recorded the 
food expended in building it as an offering 
to the sun. Cambyses, son of Cyrus, being 
defeated by the Ethiopians, vented his rage 
upon the monuments and gods of Egypt. 
He tore off their casing and left the pyra- 



The Ph'st Resurrection. 197 

mids expressionless as monuments of wor- 
ship. This hope of Egypt has been kept 
in its vast secret by the silent earth. Many 
deep burial places have been closed for 
centuries to the knowledge of man, await- 
ing the general resurrection; the Divine 
eye alone holds them in view. 

III. But ^^ our life is hid with Christ in 
God.'' In the risen Christ: ** When Christ 
our life shall appear, then shall ye also appear 
with him in glory." The paradox of Isa- 
iah found its solution in the coming of him 
whose Spirit placed it in the inspired word. 
He who was **the resurrection and the 
life" came to consummate a deliverance 
from death by death; he was ** delivered 
for our offenses and raised again for our 
justification." It would be impossible for 
so mysterious a power to find adequate ex- 
pression in mere formula; only a person, a 
visible person, could demonstrate the ex- 
istence of power over death among men. 
** But we see Jesus, who was made a little 



lg8 Studies of Bible Truths. 

lower than the angels for the suffering of 
death, crowned with glory and honor that 
he by the grace of God should taste death 
for every man. . . . That through death 
he might destroy him that had the power of 
death, that is the devil; and deliver them 
who through fear of death were all their 
lifetime subject to bondage. For verily he 
took not on him the nature of angels, but 
he took on him the seed of Abraham." 
(Heb.ii.p, 14-16.) Immediately preceding 
the raising of Lazarus, Christ discoursed 
with Martha, and declared himself to be 
** the resurrection and the life." ** He that 
believeth on me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live; and whosoever liveth and be- 
lieveth in me shall never die." (John xi. 
25 , 26. ) And yet the raising of Lazarus did 
not reveal any inherent human power, but 
only the divine power of Christ over death ; 
the same power that brought back life to 
the son of the widow of Nain and to the 
daughter of Jairus. Far different was the 



The Pirst Resurrection, 199 

effect of Christ himself tasting death; this 
demonstrated that his human and his divine 
nature were blended in one, and the exist- 
ence of the ** firstborn from the dead," 
and an incarnate power of life princely, 
eternal. As St. Peter says, " God, the Fa- 
ther of our Lord Jesus Christ, has begotten 
us again unto a lively hope by the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus Christ from the dead. ' ' Death 
became a birth; life was henceforth to be 
a law of regenerating power, issuing forth 
from the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. 

It is wonderful to mark the line of his 
vital glory as it began at his tomb and lin- 
gered over the disciples for forty da3^s, 
breathing, talking, eating, coming, going, 
working miracles, challenging love, found- 
ing an empire for the universe ; then as- 
cending through the air, away to the gates 
of heaven; far above all might, majesty, 
and nobility, in the heavenly places, the one 
ineffable Son of man. 

If God could create a body fitted for the 



200 Studies of Bible Truths. 

soul, he could as easily create a body fitted 
for the spirit, as was the body of Christ 
after his resurrection. The characteristics 
of this new body may well be studied by 
us, because it is the first fruits of a great 
harvest ; its flesh and bones — its relations to 
space, visible and invisible, like and unlike 
— the earthly and heavenly; Adam the first 
and Adam the second, Adam out of the 
ground, and Christ out of the womb of the 
morning — the final ingulfment of death in 
victory. 

IV. The Resurrection Life. Such a life 
is generic, reaching throughout the eternity 
of being. There could be no interrup- 
tion to the flow of this divine vitality, or 
intermission of its power, from the in- 
stant that Christ arose from the dead. It 
placed him at the right hand of the Fa- 
ther (Eph. i. 19-23), above all in height, in 
the heavenly places; it begins with quick- 
ening together, then rising together, and 
ends in sitting together with Christ; in this 



The jFirst Resu7'rection. 20 1 

parallel movement of life from the dead 
(Eph. ii. 5) there is no pause. It is pres- 
ently described again in its regenerating 
force on the day of Pentecost, when men 
became sons of God. They were new- 
born into a conscious divine personality, 
into the knowledge of God, and into all the 
graces of the Spirit. They were invested 
with gifts of speech, with soundness of 
mind, and the possession of miraculous 
powers. 

At this hour more than ever before the 
vitality of Christ is recognized as the all- 
sufficient evidence of his presence at the 
court of God, and as the active principle in 
the moral elevation of our race. It slum- 
bers not, it faints not. The Saviour's word 
to the Jews (John v. 25-29) accurately 
traced the order of this mighty force : *' The 
time is coming, and now is, when the dead 
shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and 
they that hear shall live." In St. Paul's 
letter to the Ephesians he states that this ex- 



202 Studies of Bible T^'uths. 

ceeding greatness of power is *' to usward 
who believe ' ' ; that it is directed to those 
who are dead in trespasses and sins; that 
by it we have life, and have it more abun- 
dantly; that in the ages to come will be 
shown through it the exceeding riches of 
God's grace in his kindness toward us 
through Christ Jesus ; that the whole sweep 
of this power moves parallel with the body 
of Christ toward the heavenly places, and 
is never again to be confined, but destined 
to move over the wastes of humanity as the 
Spirit moved over chaos. 

It was this power that delivered St. Paul 
from Judaism, and changed him into an 
exponent of Christianity. Though born a 
Hebrew of the Hebrews, he now counted 
'* all things but loss for the excellency of 
the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord : for 
whom I have suffered the loss of all things, 
and do count them but dung, that I may 
win Christ. . . . That I may know him, 
and the power of his resurrection and the 



The First Resurrection, 203 

fellowship of his sufferings being made con- 
formable unto his death; if by any means 
I might attain unto the resurrection of the 
dead" (Phil. iii. 8-1 1) — that is, its final 
glory. 

His letters to the Ephesians, to the Philip- 
pians, and to the Colossians are but the full 
statement of all that hear the voice of the 
Son of God. The arrest which he suffered 
by the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, when on 
his way to Damascus, was the first all-suffi- 
cient display to him of resurrection power. 
**Saul, Saul, wh}^ persecutest thou me?" 
The word, the person, and the power never 
afterwards left the apostle. Whether ad- 
dressing the court of Agrippa, or the mob 
in Jerusalem, or at the bar of Caesar, or be- 
fore the Sanhedrin, '* Why should it be 
thought a thing incredible with you, that 
God should raise the dead?" was the 
burden of his defense, enforced by the re- 
cital of his conversion. 

The eternal life of Christ was of his own 



204 Studies of Bible Truths. 

essential nature. This he brings into his 
incarnation. His taking to himself the na- 
ture of man was the occasion for a declara- 
tion of the fact, that as life was in the Fa- 
ther so it inhered in the Son. The end of 
his coming was to encounter and defeat 
death at its source. Individuals might be 
rescued; and some might be invested with 
power over death ; but such relief would be 
transitory. Even that power which was re- 
vealed in every encounter that Christ had 
with the monster did not inhere of neces- 
sity in his manhood, but only in his divine 
Sonship. But when he entered the portals 
of the tomb, and slept in the embraces of 
death, and presently awakened himself, and 
came forth out of that realm, *'the first- 
born from the dead," he gave to his res- 
urrection power a human, tribal quality, 
which insured life to every one who might 
afterwards enter that gloomy resting place. 
He had raised his power of life over 
death into an abiding law, for the spirit- 



The First Resurrection, 205 

ual regeneration of a redeemed humanity. 
Such a vitality could never cease. It had 
triumphed over the strongholds of death 
once and forever. It was incapable of re- 
mission or intermission. The hour had at 
length come when the dead could hear the 
voice of the Son of God: '* He that hear- 
eth my word, and believeth on him that 
sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall 
not come into condemnation; but is passed 
from death unto life." (John v. 24.) 

As to the realm in which this power 
operates, there are three authorities suf- 
ficiently reliable, namely, the Speaker's 
Commentary, the Commentary of Mat- 
thew Henry, and that of Bishop Marten- 
sen. Henry renders the verse thus : "Hav- 
ing life in himself, and being authorized 
to quicken whom he will by virtue thereof, 
there are accordingly two resurrections per- 
formed by his powerful word, both which 
are spoken of; the first a resurrection that 
now is, a resurrection from the death of 



2o6 Studies of Bible Trt^ths. 

sin to the life of righteousness, by the pow- 
er of Christ's grace. The hour is com- 
ing, and now is. It is a resurrection begun 
already, and further to be carried on, when 
the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of 
God. This is plainly distinguished from 
that in verse 28, which speaks of the resur- 
rection at the end of time. This says noth- 
ing, as that does, of the dead in their graves 
and all of them, and their coming forth." 
(Henry's Commentary, John v. 24-29.) 

The Speaker's Commentary renders it 
thus: "He that heareth my word, and be- 
lieveth him that sent me, hath life eternal, 
and Cometh not into judgment, but is passed 
out of death (the death that is truly death) 
into life (the life that is truly life) — he that 
knows the gospel, and knows that the gos- 
pel is true, cannot but have life. Eternal 
life ;s not future, but present; or rather it 
is, and so is above all time. For him who 
hath this life judgment is impossible. He 
has gone beyond it already. The issues of 



The First Resurrection. 207 

action are regarded in their potential ac- 
complishment in the present. The present 
manifestation of Christ's vivifying power in 
the spiritual resurrection ('is coming and 
now is ' ) is stated in contrast with the 
future manifestation in the general resur- 
rection." (Speaker's Commentary, John 
V. 25.) 

Bishop Martensen says: **The resurrec- 
tion of the Lord is not the mere sign of 
that regeneration ; it is itself the actual 
beginning of it. It is the sacred point 
where death has been overcome in God's 
creation; and from this point the spirit- 
ual as well as the bodily resurrection of 
the entire human race from the dead pro- 
ceeds.'* (** Christian Dogmatics," sec. 
172.) 

V. Which brings us to the conclusion 
of these words and works of the Eternal 
Spirit. 

I. And the question therefore is, Was the 
conversion of St. Paul, and of those who 



2c8 Studies of Bible Truths, 

were indued with power on the day of 
Pentecost, a resurrection? His letter to 
the Ephesians declares this power to be 
that which quickened those who were dead 
in trespasses and sins; that ''the exceed- 
ing greatness of [God's] power to usward 
who believe " was according to the work- 
ing of his mighty power which he wrought 
in Christ, when he raised him from the 
dead, and set him at his own right hand in 
the heavenly places. 

2. This then is the first resurrection; 
that which is wrought upon the heart of the 
believer; that which has been active ever 
since Christ arose; and that which has 
built a spiritual house, the Church of God, 
through the ages, and which continues its 
unwasted energy. 

3. If it is not, then a hiatus of resurrec- 
tion power extends from the sepulcher to 
the end of the world; which may include a 
greater period of time than that since the 
creation. That such a mercy could be in- 



The Kirst Resurrection, 209 

operative for thousands of years is scarcely 
credible. Or if quiet so long, there would 
then be no need of a second resurrection, 
but rather that soul and body should be 
raised together at the last trump. 

4. But if, indeed, we be risen with Christ, 
how cheering the thought that every one 
quickened with him is passed from death 
unto life, and shall not come into judg- 
ment! What a wing of spiritual power 
hovers over humanity! No wonder that 
the apostles preached the resurrection ; that 
God had begotten us again unto a lively 
hope, by which we passed out of death into 
an eternal life, by the power of the risen 
Son of God. What plain is there in which 
this voice has not echoed, or what moun- 
tain top where the feet of them that preach 
the gospel of peace have not been as the 
footsteps of the morning sun? Precious 
thought, that we come no more into con- 
demnation, but have entered into eternal 

life, and may with joy receive the atonement. 
14 



2IO Studies of Bible Truths. 

5. The hope of Egypt slumbers on in the 
hidden crypts of the mountain, or the si- 
lent corridors of the vaulted desert, await- 
ing the last trump. But the faith of the 
saints of God lives in the multiplied myr- 
iads that have been quickened century aft- 
er century, age after age, into the vitality 
of *' an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, 
that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven 
for you who are kept by the power of God, 
through faith, unto salvation ready to be re- 
vealed in the last time." For '*the hour is 
coming in which all that are in the graves 
shall hear his voice and come forth; they 
that have done good to the resurrection of 
life ; and they that have done evil unto the 
resurrection of damnation." *' Then death 
shall be swallowed up in victory." **For 
this corruptible must put on incorruption." 
** It is sown a natural body, it is raised a 
spiritual body; it is sown in weakness, it is 
raised in power; it is sown in dishonor, it 
is raised in glory. For the trumpet shall 



The First Resurrection, 211 

sound, and the dead shall be raised incor- 
ruptible, and we shall be changed." (i 
Cor. XV.) "Blessed and holy is he that 
hath part in the first resurrection : on such 
the second death hath no power, but they 
shall be priests of God and of Christ, and 
shall reign with him a thousand years." 
(Rev. XX. 6.) 



THE EASTER AURORA. 

But where are the aloes and myrrh, 
And where the sweet spices and linen, 
That filled the tomb of the Saviour 
With the breath of a palace in heaven? 

And where are those guardians of light 
That watched at the portals of glorj, 
That brake the seal of the monster, 
And rolled back the stone for Aurora? 

They still watch at the tomb of the Christian, 
With breastplate of lightning and jasper. 
To drive back the bars of his prison. 
And open his way to the Saviour, 



212 Studies of Bible Truths, 

'Twas here thou didst linger, O Jesus, 
In the rock, on the night of thj passion, 
While the gash in thj side was still weeping, 
Unchecked, in the chill of the chamber. 

'Twas here, bj thy manhood, unaided, 
Thou didst rouse the realm of the dead, 
And bear off the dark gates of Gaza — 
Imprisoned humanity's dread. 

On height above heights, lo! the Saviour, 
Who heard the ineffable groan, 
And shed on the ghastly arena 
The light that encircles his throne. 



DIES IR^. 

O that wrathful, direful, fiery day! 

When ages into ashes, all, shall melt away, 

As seen by David's light and Sibyl's mystic ray. 

With trembling terror we do now await 
The coming Judge, in high angelic state; 
Each life to weigh, and measure out its fate. 

Through regions of the dead, in piercing tone. 
The latest trump shall drown each final groan. 
And hurrying myriads gather at the throne. 



The Pirst Resurrection. 213 

Then Death and Nature, stunned with fear, 
Shall see the long since dead now reappear, 
And stand before the Judge, their doom to hear. 

O beauteous King, of majesty supreme! 

Who saving, saves with grace extreme, 

Save me, thou Spring of mercy's deepest stream! 

O Jesus, thou didst come my debt to pay, 
Now me remember in that fearful day. 
And from thy presence turn me not away. 

Faint and weary, thou didst search for me, 
And by thy passion bought me, on the tree. 
Shall all this labor, Lord, bring naught to thee? 

Sprung from a sin-convicted race, 

Sin makes me groan, and crimsons all my face; 

Yet spare, O Lord, I supplicate thy grace. 

Oh woeful day of crimes and sadness! 

Oh awful doom of flames and madness! 

Call me to thee, thou King of life and gladness! 

Ah! day of wonder, day of weeping! 
When angels come to do the reaping, 
When man from ashes reappears, 
Let mercy, Lord, then wipe away his tears! 



V. 
The Ascension of Our Lord. 

Discourse at the Funeral of Dr. T. O. Summers, 
Delivered in the Chapel of Vanderbilt 
University, May 7, 1882. 

"And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he 
lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And !t came 
to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from 
them, and carried up into heaven. And thej wor- 
shiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy ; 
and were continually in the temple, praising and 
blessing God." (Luke xxiv. 50-53.) 

My Brethren: I come this day to bury 
a good man ; to place on his bier a tribute 
of affection woven by your hands — in hon- 
or of one whom we have all known and 
loved; a man by nature of buoyant spirit, 
of sprightly mind, and of wondrous capacity 
for continuous mental application; who, in 
his early manhood, was converted, and set 
apart by the Holy Ghost to the work of the 

ministry; upon whom, while engaged in 
(214) 



The A seen Jon of Our Lord, 215 

this work, the providence of God laid many 
heart-breaking sorrows; who, under their 
severest pressure, was supplied with sus- 
taining grace, and with increasing meas- 
ures of the divine love, until his nature, 
cast and recast, at length glowed with the 
luster of his Lord, when, on yesterday, he 
was translated to that assembly 

Where every shining front displays 
The unutterable name. 

In the language of the great Wesleyan 
theologian: '* The sacred graces of our 
Lord's dying experience must be reflected 
in the dying of his saints. All death is a 
martyrdom by which the servants of Christ 
testify of redemption. Death is the last 
earthly oblation of the sinless spirit, for 
there is no grace of Christian life that is 
not made perfect in death. It is a depart- 
ure to be with Christ, the entering a house 
not made with hands, eternal in the heav- 
ens, and the attainment of an almost con- 
summate state in the general assembly and 



2i6 studies of Bible Truths. 

Church of the firstborn, which are written 
in heaven. The disembodied spirits follow 
the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, and all 
who die in the Lord are united to him in 
his glorified incarnate nature, and his heav- 
enly body is their home." 

The world hides the ghastly depth of 
the grave by the memories of the past, but 
Christians rather by the bright hope of the 
future. The pall of death changes into a 
mantle of light, under the eye of faith, as 
the humble garments of our Lord became 
in the atmosphere of the holy mount a ves- 
ture of divine glory. So do our minds now 
seek to contemplate our dear friend in his 
present state, and we turn to the sacred 
word to learn what is the experience of 
our humanity after death as rendered in the 
experience of our Lord. 

He who was the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily was also the fullness of our man- 
hood. As Adam was the source and body 
of our nature, of its freedom, its vitality 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 217 

existent, and of all its human possibilities, 
so Christ contained the sum of all the 
quickening power which belongs to the 
sons of God. We therefore invite your 
prayerful attention to a passage which de- 
scribes the consummation of the life of our 
Lord upon earth, and which is the highest 
expression of our own immortality: "And 
it came to pass, that while he blessed them, 
he was parted from them, and carried up 
into heaven." 

It was the expressed wish of the deceased, 
as announced on yesterday in the General 
Conference, that he might, if it pleased the 
Lord, go home on the day commemorative 
of the ascension. It was but one of many 
instances in which the faith of the dying 
saint discerns the body of his Lord in a 
new glory, and follows it in its upward 
flight until it enters the celestial city. All 
the formulas of immortality upon which the 
believer habitually dwells find in this action 
of Christ their brightest expression. As 



2i8 Studies of Bible Truths, 

the eye dims in death, the spiritual appre- 
hension strengthens to a more perfect real- 
ization of the invisible. And how gracious 
is our God, in having provided for the 
death-chamber a scenic statement of life 
and immortality in the radiant glories of 
the transfiguration and in the serene light 
of the ascension. In pursuing this theme, 
we consider, 

I. The I^act of the Ascension — that He 
was ** carried up into heaven." The tak- 
ing a human body up into heaven would 
imply that some greater benefit is intended 
for man than can be expressed in words. 

When the Son of God came into the 
world, we are not surprised that he should 
have assumed a body for the purpose of 
communicating with men; but we do not 
see that any such necessity existed upon his 
return to heaven. 

That he retains the human form and 
body indicates new and higher purposes of 
use for it. It may now express to us the 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 219 

nature of heaven as no language by itself 
could possibly do. 

A body that ascends or descends implies 
a place, and not simply a state, as would 
mere spirit. Its surroundings must also 
needs be substantial. If a framework of 
bones and flesh, a temple of spiritual life, 
can ascend, it may also pass chalcedony 
and sapphire; it may surpass ranges of an- 
gelic being, until it at last rests among the 
* ' things which are at the right hand of 
God." We are not surprised any longer 
that thrones and elders and harps are im- 
mediately about the Majesty in the heav- 
ens, nor that there are inlets of the river of 
life visible, fringed with trees of perpetual 
bloom. All that has been written by in- 
spired pens does not so distinctly render to 
our minds the realities of that land afar off 
as does the body of our ascended Lord. 
So long as it was merely a risen body, it af- 
fected earth; but as an ascended body, it 
affects heaven. It gives substance to it — 



220 Studies of Bible Truths. 

character and expression. It is that much 
of earth — immortal earth — projected into 
heaven. 

That which has been thirty-three years 
in earth, which was '* framed in the lowest 
parts of the earth," must needs have an 
earthly quality. And the mind now dwells 
minutely upon this manhood of our Lord, 
to see if it be ours, if ** we are the members 
of his body, of his bone, and of his flesh." 
For by just that much does his presence in 
glory demonstrate the strength of our hope. 
His God is our God, his Father ours, and 
his heaven ours. 

It was his risen body that ascended ; yet 
that body never at any time appeared glo- 
rious, though once before the resurrection 
he was transfigured and became incandes- 
cent with divine light. And now we are 
more concerned wdth the sobriety of the 
expression than with the splendor of the 
risen body. We want to know that it is a 
veritable body ; after that we are easily sat- 



The Ascension of Our Lord, 221 

isfied. Like Thomas, we wish to touch it 
and find substance; to look at it, to exam- 
ine it, and see the scars of its hands and 
side. And this we are permitted to do; 
to *' handle" those hands, and see those 
prints of love which will mark them for- 
ever. " See," said the Lord, '* that I have 
bones, and am not merely spirit; feel, and 
believe." They stood around him examin- 
ing his body — the last touch of it that was 
ever to be made by human hand. *' Now," 
said he, **see me eat"; and they gave him 
fish and a piece of honeycomb, and *' he ate 
it before them." 

The various phases of this Form, from 
which all death was now eliminated, show 
new powers of expression and singular 
freedom from all the usual limitations of 
matter, yet retain all the while a firm out- 
line, and cannot be dissipated into those of 
mere spirit. Under the will of the Saviour, 
it took on the expression of a gardener, of 
a traveler, of the Master among the nets 



222 Studies of Bihle Truths. 

and boats of Galilee, of a Redeemer just 
from the cross, mighty in battle, with the 
blows of the lictor and the scars of the 
Roman execution still upon him; and also 
of universal Lordship upon the mountain. 
And it was never more a body than when 
by appointment he walked out from Jeru- 
salem to Olivet, in the direction of Beth- 
any, in company with his disciples, with 
the purpose of ascending up where he was 
before. The talk by the way of his king- 
dom ; the exhortation to his chosen ones to 
reach out for universal empire ; to wait for 
the promise of the Father which he would 
send upon them so soon as he had come 
into position; the minuter direction to start 
abroad, beginning at Jerusalem and Sama- 
ria, to go forth to the ends of the earth — 
these parting counsels, so grandly like him- 
self, prevented their attention to those per- 
sons whom they met coming into the city; 
or to the dust of that via sacra which was 
presently to be a part of the highway by 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 223 

which men go to heaven. They only no- 
ticed that all at once he was moved from 
them a little space in advance, and seemed 
a little higher, and that he was in the act of 
blessing them. Now, slowly, as if gravita- 
tion had barely turned the other way, he 
moves upward ! They hear his words, 
they see his face and hands ; there is not a 
fleck of mist upon the air: he only seems 
lighter than earth, and by his own will, 
without chariot or steed or angel, he goes 
up, gaining steadily upon the clear body of 
the sky, when presently a cloud, before un- 
seen, suddenly intervenes and shuts him out 
from their sight! They see where he has 
disappeared, and still gaze intently at the 
place, when a voice calls them back to 
earth. It was the voice of two men clothed 
in white apparel: **Ye men of Galilee, 
why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? This 
same Jesus w^hich is taken up from you into 
heaven shall so come in like manner as ye 
have seen him go up into heaven." The 



2 24 Studies of Bible Truths. 

Spirit fills them with joy unutterable, the 
wonder of his ascent still entrances all the 
powers of their being. They are in the 
temple day and night praising God. 

It was this last act that gave the highest 
dignity to the human body, and included all 
its other powers and dignities. By this one 
movement it reached out toward all the pos- 
sessions of heaven, as if made for purposes 
there rather than here. It was a positive 
assertion of life which was more than a suc- 
cessful resistance of death. 

After the resurrection the Saviour re- 
mained on the earth forty days, that he 
might by the achievements of his body 
convey adequately to the Church that which 
could only be comprehended after the event 
of his death and resurrection : the true con- 
ception of immortality; the sacred value of 
his body as an offering for the sins of the 
world; his power over not only the grave, 
but over all wickedness in high places — 
over him that had the power of death; the 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 225 

true idea of his ubiquity, and of his provi- 
dence toward his Church to the end of the 
world. To this he now adds the highest 
expression of universal Lordship in the as- 
cension to heaven of his body. By this act 
he places the body side by side with the 
spirit, in the last statement of its quickened 
powers; and by it consummates all those 
processes of the incarnation, the crucifix- 
ion, and the resurrection by which his body 
has been shown worthy to be an eternal 
factor in the Divine Subsistence. 

We consider, 

II. The Glory of His Ascent. Along 
with the identity, the incorruption, the spir- 
itual nature, and the powers of the resur- 
rection-body of our Lord, there seemed to 
be one other quality needed to constitute it 
the type of the spiritual body with which 
we are all to be raised — that of glory. 
Through all the action of the days between 
his coming out of the grave and his going 

up to heaven, there was a marked absence 
15 



226 Studies of Bible Truths. 

of splendor. The angel of the resurrection 
looked like lightning, and for fear of him 
the keepers became as dead men, but the 
Lord himself looked like a gardener. There 
is everything present we could ask for but 
this glory — his grace, his teaching, his voice, 
but nothing of the glory of the celestial Be- 
ing that he was. And this sobriety of color 
is maintained to the very last instant, when 
he was about to ascend. Indeed, the splen- 
dor which belonged to this hour of his new 
nativity seems to have been separated from 
it, and to have been moved back, as was 
the sunlight on the dial, to an hour previous 
to the crucifixion. That that display be- 
longed of right to the resurrection would 
seem to be indicated in the Master's charge 
to his three disciples, as they came down 
the mount, that they were not to speak of 
this scene of ineffable radiance until the 
Son of man should be risen again from the 
dead. The same restraint of magnificence 
is carried beyond the instant of the ascen- 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 227 

sion, and continues until **a cloud received 
him out of their sight." That cloud was 
the shroud of his ^lory to men ; but like the 
pillared cloud which was his martial cloak 
at Israel's head for forty years, it had its 
bright side. The glory of his ascent could 
not be restrained after he entered fairly 
upon its prophetic fulfillment. Then *'the 
chariots of God were twenty thousand, even 
thousands of angels. '* The Lord was 
among this splendid retinue, as in Sinai, in 
the holy place. He ascends on high, he 
leads captivity captive — '* a multitude of 
captives" — he "receives gifts for men." 
In this august pomp he is announced, and 
enters the holy place "the Lord of hosts," 
"the Lord, mighty in battle," and ascends 
up into the " mountain of his holiness." The 
might and glory of this exceeding great 
power of ascent is to be henceforth the 
measure of all power to usward who be- 
lieve. An arc of billowy light springing 
from the sepulcher and resting on the 



228 Studies of Bible Truths, 

throne marks the flight of his chariot — 
stretching far awa}?- in the sight of angels 
beyond the portals of heaven, above all 
principality and power and might and do- 
minion, and every name that is named, to a 
point where all things are under his feet. 

In the height of this glory is a human 
body. The Son of man appears in heaven 
as the Son of God appeared on earth. 
The incarnation serves its sublime purpose 
there no less than here. The distinctness 
of its outline conveys to angels, if they 
think as we do, a yet higher conception of 
the Godhead, for they now see its fullness 
in the glorified body of the Son. And as 
he passes into the several ranges of angelic 
life, he repeats the wonder of his incarna- 
tion ; and when he passes out of that into a 
yet higher order of being, he repeats the 
glory of the ascension, and so moves from 
glory to glory, until thrones of sapphire, 
and heights of emerald, and seats of ame- 
thyst have been left behind in his ascent up 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 229 

to the plane of the throne of the Godhead. 
St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, 
gives this very movement of the Son of 
God, and names these terraces of angelic 
and seraphic being through which he 
moved. 

We may not speculate upon the wonders 
of expression there were in the body of 
Christ to those vast hosts of holy angels 
which saw with anxiety the original depart- 
ure of the Son when he put off his glory to 
enter upon the work of redemption. But 
their desire to solve this vast movement of 
the Godhead never abated from that instant 
until his return. They sought, as the holy 
prophets had sought before them, to **look 
into" his sufferings and into the glory 
which should follow. They now saw it 
with hushed rapture, as when the disciples 
looked into the wound in his side and ex- 
amined the scar on his hand. The perfect 
sympathy of God with his creatures could 
no longer be questioned. This expression 



230 Studies of Bible Truths, 

of his love, which satisfied God himself 
and satisfied men, now satisfies the angels. 
The justice which spared not an only-be- 
gotten Son, when he took the place of the 
sinner, could no longer be doubted as be- 
ing absolutely essential to the maintenance 
of eternal law. And when they saw the 
redeemed, who, like Moses and Elias, with 
anticipated glory had entered the confines 
of heaven, the first fruits of his triumph; 
when they heard the pseans of those noble 
spirits who came out of great tribulation, as 
they rolled through the spacious music of 
the new song of Moses and of the Lamb; 
and when, lo! upon a sea of glass, in the 
midst of the four cherubim, and the four 
and twenty elders, and the seven lamps of 
the eternal Spirit, there stood He, as he 
had erewhile stood in Gabatha, they too 
burst forth, ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand of them, with voices and harps, in 
symphony with the redeemed: **Worth37'is 
the Lamb that was slain to receive power 



The Ascension of Our Lord, 231 

and riches and wisdom and strength and 
honor and glor}'^ and blessing." And the 
universe swelled the chorus: **Unto Him 
that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the 
Lamb forever and ever." 

We have considered (i) the accom- 
plished fact of the ascension, (2) the glory 
of the ascent; now we notice, 

III. The End of It — in the ascended form 
of the Son of man, radiant with the full 
glory of the eternal Son, unveiled to heav- 
en and earth, enthroned, the divine-human 
eternal Person, Alpha and Omega, the first 
and the last, which is, and which was, and 
which is to come, the Almighty. We can 
conceive of no higher place in the universe 
than this where culminates the exaltation of 
our Lord. But in what section of his as- 
cent this splendor of person burst forth 
from the King of glory we may not exactly 
determine. That part from the cloud to 
the entrance of the gates is revealed by 
David as one of vast movement, involving 



2^2 Studies of Bible Truths, 

thousands of angels and of ** released cap- 
tives." The heads of these columns must 
have been on this part of the line of his as- 
cent, and fell in with careering pomp as of 
war chariots in the royal progress. At the 
front of this retinue the King himself as the 
Lord of hosts, approaches the celestial 
gates, which, after summons and challenge, 
are hfted for the sublime entrance of the 
King of kings and Lord of lords. Beyond 
this section is that part which transpires 
after passing through the gates into the 
city. This is revealed to us by St. Paul. 
He that ascended at first descended to the 
lowest place of the earth, and by so much 
he now ascends up far higher than to the 
mere heaven — *'far above all heavens." 
The Father of glory raises him to his own 
right hand, up to the very head of all prin- 
cipality and power, and far above all. 

It is only by the Revelation of St. John 
that we at last see the Son clad in the ha- 
biliments of Godhead — *'who coverest thy- 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 233 

self with light as with a garment." But 
this is at the end of his ascension. The 
Church waits for the sight which Thomas 
longed to see, the visible display of his per- 
son radiant with the divine luster of the 
Son, the glory which Moses saw, and that 
which the disciples saw when they were 
** eye-witnesses of his Majesty" in the holy 
mount. And it is only when this honor 
and glory again rest upon him as the ** be- 
loved Son" that the Church fully realizes 
that he is the " Lord of glory." 

This reserve of splendor in the ascension 
holds the mind in expectation, and throws 
it forward to the heavenly places where it 
gathers such an ideal of the Son of God 
as it is willing to rest in and continually 
reckon from. It was on the Lord's day in 
dreary Patmos, when a great voice start- 
ling as a trumpet, calling from behind, said, 
**I am Alpha and Omega." The apostle 
instantly turned about and saw the vision of 
the mount of transfiguration repeated. The 



234 Studies of Bible Truths, 

Son of man was in an abyss of light, his 
head and hair white as wool, his face shin- 
ing as the sun, his eyes as flames, his feet 
as brass in the glow of a furnace. About 
him were golden candlesticks. When John 
saw him he fell as one dead, and heard the 
voice as before saying: ** Fear not, I am he 
that liveth and was dead. What thou seest 
and hearest send to the Churches." Here 
Christ is in all the majesty of the Sonship. 
This vision is followed by one in which the 
throne of the Father is set — amid light- 
nings, thunderings, and voices; amid cher- 
ubim, elders, and angels. And from him 
the Lamb receives, amid universal acclaim 
of ten thousands of thousands, the book of 
the inheritance of the Church, the cove- 
nants of God, as the one representative of 
his race — the Root of David, the Lion of 
Juda. 

Into this height it is not the body of man 
merely that has received such ineffable maj- 
esty, but our manhood itself. The race 



The Ascension of Our Lord. 235 

could not have been used for such lofty 
expression to the universe of intelligences 
without deriving therefrom the very highest 
benefit of divine favor. When humanity 
was taken up into the very expression of 
the Trinity, there must needs be an eternal 
good derived to it commensurate with this 
divine-human expression. 

And far backward now does this splendor 
of the end of the ascension throw its beams : 
away back to the first garden and the first 
announcement of the Saviour; and after- 
wards its star canopies the spot where the 
Babe lay ; then in the night shadows of Geth- 
semane its rays flash through those scarlet 
drops as they fall from the agony of the Di- 
vine Victim ; it lights up the chamber at the 
head and at the foot where Joseph of Ari- 
mathea honorably laid to rest the body of his 
crucified Lord ; it flashed upon the dew-cov- 
ered flowers at the mouth of the sepulcher 
on the early morn when the Son of man 
came forth from it. It is this bearing of the 



236 Studies of Bible Truths. 

Eternal Person of the Son, unveiled, upon 
*' the Word made flesh which dwelt among 
us," that fills at once the heart, the intel- 
lect, and the imagination of every child of 
God with adoring gratitude, and an all-sat- 
isfying perception of the invisible Saviour. 
He it is that now pours out from his glori- 
fied presence the holy Comforter, as the 
administrator of his own kingdom of power 
and of love, upon the world and upon the 
Church which he has bought with his own 
blood . Whether we look backward or for- 
ward from those heights where he now sits, 
the splendor of his glorified Form reveals to 
us the riches of the glory of his love in the 
width of the inheritance which he has se- 
cured for us. Every resting place of the 
ascent above he has taken possession of for 
us by the bare presence of his human form. 
He received at every altitude and ledge 
of supernal habitation gifts *'for men," and 
in turn makes them possible **to men." 
From the highest place of Godhead he 



The Ascension of Our Lord, 237 

sends down a nobility upon earth which 
shall answer to the hierarchies of heaven : 
the spiritual gifts which find their limita- 
tions in the creation of apostles, prophets, 
martyrs, evangelists, and pastors — the aris- 
tocracy which by and by are to be the hab- 
itation of God through the Spirit. It is at 
this height of divine realities that the Son 
will prepare for his people bodies like to 
his own, as were those of Moses and of 
Elijah. Here, as the Architect of the heav- 
en of the redeemed, he prepares our ** man- 
sions '^ for us, and the *' tabernacles " which 
Peter called for will at last be raised in all 
their Messianic beauty. 

There is yet another reach which the 
Son of man gives to our conception of the 
divine love and mercy. The federal Head 
of our race is seated upon a throne of glory. 
From that throne he breathes his loving 
care for all the Churches. The cold, the 
zealous, the patient, the pure, the noble — 
all he tries to arm with his own mind. 



238 Studies of Bible Truths. 

He braces them in that first hour of the 
Church's trial with promise of crowns and 
palms and thrones and most secret fellow- 
ship with the Father and with his Son: **I 
have somewhat against thee because thou 
hast left thy first love." O blessed Sav- 
iour, dost thou remember thy weak chil- 
dren in the midst of the throne? Is the 
love of one — is my love — anything now to 
thee? Thank God! he is the same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever, whether in the 
gloomy passes of death or in the heights of 
life ! In his humiliation he loved me, in his 
exaltation he still loves me. 

It was on this sublime pathway upon 
which our Saviour went that the spirit of 
our dear Summers went. ''We are quick- 
ened together with Christ, raised together 
with him, and seated together with him in 
the heavenly places." By some mysterious 
tie our spirits move in parallel lines with his 
body. His is a spiritual body; and along 
the same aisles we move, through the silent 



The Ascension of Our Lord, 239 

chamber, or penetrating the hard rock, or 
engineering the vast spaces outlying; his 
road emerges on the other side of the dark 
mountain and hangs over the broad river 
of life, and so does ours. He lives, and we 
shall live also. Our names are written in a 
book sprinkled with his blood. The good- 
ly company who have been redeemed will 
be with him, and close pursue the Lamb in 
all those years which shall intervene be- 
tween the hour when we part here and the 
one when we shall meet there. Blessed be 
his name forever and forever ! Amen. 



NOV 26 1900 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 1 6066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



k: 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 243 197 A 



t 

•r I 
4 ] 



' Wl 



■s. 



I 



v *< 



